Experiential Imagination and the Inside/Outside-Distinction ⋆ Kristina Liefke 1 and Markus Werning 2 1,2 Department of Philosophy II, Ruhr-University Bochum, 44780 Bochum, Germany {kristina.liefke, markus.werning}@rub.de 1 https://www.rub.de/phil-inf/ 2 https://www.rub.de/phil-lang/ Abstract Gerundive imagination reports with an embedded reflexive subject (e.g. Zeno imagines himself swimming ) are ambiguous between an ‘inside’ and an ‘outside’ reading: the inside reading captures the imagi- ner’s directly making the described experience (here: swimming); the out- side reading captures the imaginer’s having an experience of an event, in- volving his own counterpart, from an out-of-body point of view (watching one’s counterpart swim). Our paper explains the inside/outside-ambiguity through the observation (i) that imagining can referentially target differ- ent phenomenal experiences – esp. proprioception (i.e. bodily feeling) and visual perception (seeing, watching) – and (ii) that imagining and its as- sociated experience can both be de se. Inside/outside readings then arise from intuitive constraints in the lexical semantics of verbs like feel, see. Keywords: Inside/outside readings · Imagistic perspective · Experien- tial imagining · Self-imagining · Counterfactual parasitism. 1 Introduction Imagination reports like (1) are generally taken to have two different kinds of de se -reading (see e.g. [2, 39–41]): an inside (subjective, or experiential ) reading, 1 which captures what it would be like for the imaginer to undergo the described experience; and an outside (objective, or imagistic ) reading, which captures what it would be like for the imaginer to witness an event, that involves his own coun- terpart, from an out-of-body point of view. The inside reading of (1), i.e. (1a), reports a relation towards the bodily experiences of Zeno’s swimming counter- part (e.g. the salty taste of the water, the tug of the current, the feeling of cold). The outside reading, (1b), reports a relation towards the target of Zeno’s (coun- ⋆ We thank two reviewers for LENLS17 for valuable comments on the pr´ ecis of this paper. The paper has profited from discussions with Alex Grzankowski and Ede Zimmermann. Kristina Liefke’s contribution was supported by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through grant no. ZI 683/13-1 (to Ede Zimmermann). Markus Werning’s contribution is supported by DFG grants no. 419038924 and no. 419040015 as part of the DFG research group Constructing Scenarios of the Past (FOR 2812). 1 In philosophy and psychology, the inside and the outside reading are commonly asso- ciated with a first-person field perspective on the experienced event, respectively with a third-person observer perspective on this event (see e.g. [2, 17, 18, 22, 29, 30, 35]). To appear in: N. Okazaki, K. Yada, K. Satoh, & K. Mineshima (eds.) New Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence (2021), Springer, New York (2021).