Experiential Imagination and the Inside/Outside-Distinction

Gerundive imagination reports with an embedded reflexive subject (e.g. Zeno imagines himself swimming) are ambiguous between an 'inside' and an 'outside' reading: the inside reading captures the imaginer's directly making the described experience (here: swimming); the outside reading captures the imaginer's having an experience of an event, involving his own counterpart, from an out-of-body point of view (watching one's counterpart swim). Our paper explains the inside/outsideambiguity through the observation (i) that imagining can referentially target different phenomenal experiences - esp. proprioception (i.e. bodily feeling) and visual perception (seeing, watching) - and (ii) that imagining and its associated experience can both be de se. Inside/outside readings then arise from intuitive constraints in the lexical semantics of verbs like feel, see.