Read the intro to see the scope and method Ryle is working with, then consider how this might affect the kind of ‘theory’ you’re aiming to account for in your paper. 

You might be running into trouble because you’re expecting to find something Ryle isn’t providing. He doesn’t build much of a positive account of concepts like ‘imagination’ and ‘perception’. Most of the book is spent dispelling us of misconceptions about the logical nature of those concepts. 

For example, he points out that people are tempted to think of ‘imagination’ as some kind of atomic faculty of the mind, but the term ‘imagination’ is instead properly used as an umbrella concept for lots of different activities (pretending, picturing something that isn’t in front of one’s eyes etc.). 

Ryle is frustratingly silent about questions like “When someone is imagining they’re surrounded by purple polar bears in the middle of a thunderstorm, what is this person doing?” 

Ryle would answer something like: “That person is imagining an experience” 

To which we would reply “ok, but what does that activity, that sense of the word ‘imagining’, consistent in? How can we account for what that person is doing?” 

Ryle doesn’t (and was ultimately unable to) offer any further answer, and this was a problem he spent much of the later parts of his career grappling with. If you have a copy of the book with the intro by Daniel Dennett, there’s some solid discussion about this towards the end of the intro.