![]() Moreover, the distinction is not defined in terms of metacognition. Despite being subjective, the distinction is still a distinction between what a thinker ought to treat as realistic in light of the thinker’s own experience and what the thinker ought to treat as fantastic in light of that experience and not merely the distinction between what the thinker actually does take to be realistic and what the thinker does not. ![]() But if I have never seen this, such a course of imagination might still be fantastic for me. If you have seen a jumbo jet sailing through the air, then a course of imagining representing such a thing will be realistic. What is fantastic for one thinker, may be realistic for another, who has had different experiences. The distinction between realistic and fantastic, as I understand it, is a subjective distinction and subject to learning. There may be auditory, tactile and other sorts of images, corresponding to sensory modalities other than vision, and a distinction between realistic and fantastic may pertain to these as well, but for present purposes I will consider exclusively visual mental imagery. I will refer to an episode of temporally evolving mental imagery interchangeably as a course of imagination or as a mental movie. Moreover, as we will see, a mental image may embody a kind of analysis of the represented scene in a way a picture does not. It may represent a continuous sequence of events over a period of time, like a movie, in which case the mental imagery occurs over time in a sequence corresponding to the sequence of the events represented. What I am calling a mental image need not be static, like a still photograph. A mental image can be conceived as a “picture in the head”, but the metaphor is in many ways misleading. Roughly, a mental image is a representation that shares a format with perceptions but which differs from a perception in that perceptions are generated exogenously, in direct response to the properties of the object or scene perceived, while mental images are generated endogenously. I will take for granted that it is clear enough what a mental image is, although a precise definition might be hard to achieve. ![]() What I am calling imagining consists of forming mental images. So I take the glasses first from the front. But if I imagine taking them from the back while the tray remains resting on the counter, then that is fantastic (because the glasses in the front will cause the tray to tip up and spill the remaining glasses onto the floor). If I imagine taking them from the front while the tray remains resting on the counter, then that is realistic. In unloading the glasses from the tray, I can take them first from the front or I can take them first from the back. But I set the tray on the counter in such a way that almost half of it is not in contact with the surface. I bring a tray of clean glasses from the dishwasher to a counter, intending to transfer them to a cupboard. Or suppose I am an employee in a restaurant. So I cut a piece that I can realistically imagine wrapping the box with. But if I imagine a piece of paper only so big and imagine myself completely wrapping the box with it, then I am imagining fantastically. If I imagine a piece of paper so big, then I can realistically imagine completely wrapping the box with it. If I want to wrap a box in gift wrap and need to cut a piece of wrapping paper from a roll, then I can use my imagination to determine how big the piece has to be in order to fully cover the box. We utilize the distinction between realistic and fantastic imagination in solving problems by means of mental imagery. If that were to happen, I would not believe my eyes. But if I imagine a wine glass falling from a shelf and on the way down turning into a bird and flying away, then I know that what I have imagined is fantastic. If the wine glass actually fell, I would not be surprised to see exactly that happen. If I imagine knocking a wine glass full of wine off a shelf, and imagine it falling and shattering and splattering wine all around the point of impact, then that course of imagination will count as realistic. We commonly draw a distinction between mental imagery that is realistic and mental imagery that is fantastic.
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