Imagining oneself being someone else

Abstract

Sometimes, one can imagine, in virtue of having some experience, that one is someone else having some property.This is puzzling if imagination is a guide to possibility, since it seems impossible for one to be someone else. In this paper, I offer a way of dissolving the puzzle. When one claims that, by having some experience, one imagines that one is someone else having some property, what one imagines, I suggest, is that if the other person had the property in question, then having it would be, for them, like having the relevant experience is for one. I discuss two alternative views about the content of these episodes of imagination,and argue that both of them are too weak and too strong.The proposed view avoids the two difficulties while preserving some intuitions about the phenomenology and the epistemology of imagination which are captured by the alternative views.