Many philosophers distinguish between propositional imagination (imagining that P) and non-propositional imagination, dividing the latter into objectual imagining (imagining E) (Yablo 1993) and active imagining (imagining X-ing) (Walton 1990).
If dream beliefs are propositional imaginings, then we cannot falsely believe, while dreaming, that we are now awake, but can only imagine that we are.
On this view, propositions and propositional functions have an order.
Imagine a piece of (propositional) information such as "the earth has only one moon".
They do not target the premises or conclusions involved in a particular thought experiment but question the phenomenon, i.e. the non-propositional heart of an imagined scenario (see Brown, 2007a).
Like belief and imagination, desire has a propositional use.
Moreover, it is difficult to see how, giving up possible worlds and intensions in favor of a purely extensional theory, the Davidsonian program could account for the semantics of propositional attitude ascriptions of the form "A believes (hopes, imagines, etc).
As is easy to imagine, there are two obvious reactions to the problem of propositional knowledge provided that assumption (b) is agreed upon.
Imagine an impure associationist model of the mind, one that contains both propositional and associative structures.
This is noteworthy since many critics of eliminativism claim it is virtually impossible to imagine what a psychological theory would look like that doesn't invoke propositional attitudes to explain cognition (Hannan, 1993).
It certainly wouldn't be sufficient merely to claim that marriage is/isn't necessarily heterosexual on the basis of "platitudes," much less on "an act of rational insight [into] the propositional content itself"; or because speakers found the inference from marriage to heterosexuality "primitively compelling" and couldn't imagine gay people getting married!
