To save your son’s life, you must imagine the event of your son’s life being saved, and this imagination is not the event itself. It’s a quotation, like the difference between “snow” and snow. But that doesn’t mean that what’s inside the quote marks must itself be a cognitive state. If you choose the action that leads to the future that you represent with “my son is still alive,” then you have functioned as an engine to steer the future into a region where your son is still alive. Not an engine that steers the future into a region where you represent the sentence “my son is still alive.” To
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Cf. Imagining oneself as having died
