The difference between imagination and belief

QUESTION: Two people in a room are asked to imagine a lion. One closes her eyes and says: ‘Yes, now I see it; it’s walking around; I see the mane and the tail.’ The other person runs screaming from the room. Which one is imagining a lion?

ANSWER: Clearly the person running out of the room is imagining a lion. The other is imagining a movie of a lion. There are no sense organs in our brains; if there were, we would see nerves and not lions. To imagine something is to behave in the absence of that thing as you would normally do in its presence – as you would do if you perceived that thing. Thus, as Aristotle said, imagination depends on perception. Actors on the stage are performing acts of imagination. Good acting is not a consequence of good imagination but is itself good imagination.

No, no, no. The difference between the two people isn't fundamentally because of how good their imaginations are. It's that the person who runs away actually believes a lion is there. They might also have a vivid mental picture of the lion but that's not the same as believing their mental perceptions are true. Instead they have a delusional, hallucinatory belief - the kind of idea that possess the mind rather than one the mind possess, as someone once put it. It's entirely possible to imagine a lion in immaculate detail, from the flecks of dirt in its fur to the hot saliva dripping off its teeth, even secondary effects like the sense of fear the beast would engender, without actually believing that it's real. Conversely one could be utterly terrified of a fairly shoddy imagining of a lion if one believed it was real. Imagination, belief and consequent behaviour are different things. Imagination may depend on perception but belief doesn't.

I insisted that ‘I love you’ is a trite and overused, and therefore meaningless, phrase. I added that if they didn’t know I loved them from my behaviour, nothing I said would make them believe it. My wife said: ‘Well, say it anyway.’ I refused and added: ‘But I’ll tell you what I will do. I’ll say “You love me,” which is neither trite nor meaningless, but based on extensive behavioural observation.’ Then we exchanged ‘You love me’ all around. We were in a much better place than if we had said ‘I love you’: we each had unmistakable evidence for what we said – that we were loved – and could be truly believed.

They're a bloody daft lot if you ask me. Inasmuch as we can know anything at all, we can know our own opinions. Other people are much harder to gauge. True, their behaviour constitutes extremely important evidence as to their opinions. But what they say their opinion is also matters. Combine both as you've got the best possible evidence. If we state our opinion of someone else's opinion, we're only going to believe them if they react appropriately. So we end up back where we started, i.e. expressing our own opinions. Anyway, this particular sort of belief is hardly one that's based on rational evidence, so it's a silly example anyway.
https://aeon.co/ideas/teleological-behaviourism-or-what-it-means-to-imagine-a-lion