Abstract
Contemporary studies of imagination tend to go off track because of two inveterate presuppositions and a problematic attitude. One presupposition, a heritage of Romanticism, is that imagination is the power of creativity; the other is that the prototypical case of imagining is calling to mind and holding there a visual image of something absent. If imagination can be creative, it can also be banal, routine, and conventional, and an adequate theory must come to terms with this. The second presupposition, imagination as visualization without a real object, is as old as inquiry into imagination. Its shortcoming is that it leads to treating imagination as a feeble cognitive function and confusing it with memory. The problematic attitude is "antipsychologism," a tendency that has strongly influenced philosophers and psychologists for more than a century. Antipsychologism avoids investigating, and sometimes categorically denies the existence of, private psychological powers and events that appear to resist objectification by scientific methods. Recent psychological experiments (which might easily have been performed a century ago) have shown that verifiable investigation is possible here. More fundamental, however, is that imagination is a power of emergent and mobile appearance rather than finished cognition, and in that sense even memory and cognition are dependent on it. By experimenting with other modes of imagining than the visual, especially smell and hearing, the reader can see that, and how, such presuppositions and attitudes have produced a misidentification of the most basic phenomena of imagining.