Imagining Emotions

In this paper, I give an account of what it is to imagine an emotion, that is, of the mental state that allows us to have some kind of access to an emotion without having that emotions ourselves. I start from four desiderata that a theory should account for: first, imagining an emotion is a different mental state from having that emotion, and it has a different phenomenology; second, we sometimes attribute the imagined emotion to someone as part of the mental state of imagining the emotion; third, imagining an emotion can sometimes be coloured by the imaginer’s perspective; and fourth, we sometimes imagine an emotion with a degree of vagueness. I argue against one possible theory, the simulationist one, which claims that imagining an emotion amounts to forming a similar mental state to that emotion. I then defend the theory that imagining an emotion is forming a thick meta-representation of that emotion. It is a representation of that emotion, and, given that emotions are representational, it is a meta-representation. It is thick in the sense that it gives access to the phenomenal properties of the emotion, like a painting of a scene gives access to how that scene looks.