Shared Imagining. Beyond Extension, Distribution, and Commitment

It seems fairly uncontroversial to say that there are certain activities that we can perform together, such as walking or perceiving; and certain states that we can share, such as the emotional state of together enjoying that walk or that perception. How exactly these ‘we-phenomena’ are best described is the topic of much current philosophical debate. However, most of the debate on collective intentionality focuses on experiences that are constitutively related to public objects, events or environments. However, what if the objects or events at which an activity is directed, and the environments in which the activity occurs, are not, or at least not in any obvious way public and thus ‘sharable’? And what if the activity itself is not observable by anybody but the subject of the activity: Is there still a sense in which this activity can be performed ‘together'? It seems that imagining is an activity that is not observable, at least not in a straightforward way, and that lacks both a public object at which it is directed and a public environment in which it occurs. Is there, then, even such a thing as shared imagining? In what follows, I use a phenomenological approach to find an answer to this question. I distinguish socially ‘embedded’, ‘extended’, and ‘distributed’ modes of imagining from genuinely‘shared’ modes of imagining.

ISBN:978-1138221000

Jaar van publicatie:2018