The Imaging Reader: Visualization and Embodiment of Metaphysical Discourse

This book presents an innovative view of metaphysical discourse as inherently modal, counterfactual and, as such, textualized according to the truth-conditional patterns of Possible Worlds Semantics in Modal Logic. The aim is to show how the textual structure of this type of discourse induces in the readers' minds cognitive processes of an imaging kind, allowing a visualization of the abstract epistemic constructions of possible worlds as if they were mental images. Such images, in turn, work as deontic prompts compelling readers to embody, physically and experientially, the possibilities, necessities, and contingencies suggested by the semantic structure of metaphysical texts. The empirical reader who makes use of these interpretative processes is here defined as Imaging Reader. The book proposes a cognitive-functional model for analyzing, in all-involving and interactive way, a variety of generic types of metaphysical discourse (e.g., argumentative and anthropological texts, imagist poetry, as well as modernist paintings) and their interpretations by imaging.