Imagine what it feels like

Often in our everyday lives, for instance, in decision-taking, empathizing with others, and engaging with fictions, we are able to imagine what a particular emotion feels like. This chapter analyzes the structure of these imaginings as a kind of experiential imagining. After introducing the topic (section 1), I argue that these imaginings cannot be explained exclusively by their content and that a focus on the mode of imagining is required. We not only imagine having emotions, but we also imagine them experientially, and this means that we imagine feeling them (section 2). I proceed to analyze the content of such imaginings in terms of the phenomenal properties of emotions undergone from a particular subjective perspective within the imagined scenario (section 3). Next, I argue that the mode in which such emotions are experientially imagined requires other-oriented perspective-shifting and the recreation of an emotion-like state (section 4). I examine how we recreate emotion-like states in two cases: when the emotion has been previously felt (section 5) and when it has not been previously experienced (section 6). The main findings are summarized in the conclusion (section 7).