Interacting with Emotions: Imagination and Supposition

A widespread claim, which I call ‘the Emotionality Claim’ (EC), is that imagination but not supposition is intimately linked to emotion. In more cognitive jargon, imagination is connected to the affect system (i.e., the mechanisms that produce emotional responses), whereas supposition is not. EC is open to several interpretations which yield very different views about the nature of supposition. The literature lacks an in-depth analysis of EC which sorts out these different readings and ways to carve supposition and imagination at their joints. The aim of this paper is to fill this gap. I shall argue that existing readings of EC fail to properly account for the emotional asymmetry between imagination and supposition. The tendency is to start from narrow conceptions of both imagination and supposition. I shall argue for a novel interpretation of EC pivoting on different ways a mental state can connect to the affect system.