At the end of “The Imagination and the Self,” Bernard Williams uncovers a common confusion about the range of thoughts in which the metaphysics of personal identity is implicated. When I imagine being someone else, I can be described as imagining that I am the other person – which sounds as if I am imagining a relation of identity between that person and me, David Velleman. As Williams points out, however, this particular way of imagining that I am another person is not really about me or my identity with anyone.

If my approach to imagining that I am Napoleon, for example, is to imagine being Napoleon, then I simply imagine a particular situation as experienced by Napoleon. I imagine the landscape at Austerlitz as seen through Napoleon's eyes, the sounds of battle as heard through his ears, the nap of a tunic as felt by his hand. Although Napoleon doesn't appear in the resulting mental image, he does appear in the content of my imagining, since I am imagining Austerlitz specifically as experienced by him.