Séminaire Philmath

Nous aurons le plaisir d'accueillir : A.Özgün (Amsterdam University)

Intentional modals, such as knowability [4], knowledge [8], belief [3, 10], and, of particular interest for this talk, imagination [1, 2, 6, 12], have recently received topic-sensitive treatment, which proceeds by taking seriously their intentionality – by focusing on the specific subject matter they are about. The central idea is that, much like linguistic expressions, these modals have topics, and the space of topics is conveniently structured by means of a parthood relation. This approach has been particularly useful in the development of logics for imagination, especially the notion of imagination as reality-oriented mental simulation—a concept that plays a crucial role in, e.g., counterfactual thought, pretense, contingency planning, and decision-making.
A prominent logic of imagination, proposed in [1], employs binary imagination operators, Iφψ, which represent an imagination or mental simulation operator and are read as: ‘In an act of imagination starting with input φ, one imagines that ψ’. Semantically, this operator is modelled using Lewis-Stalnaker-style set-selection functions over possible worlds [9], combined with a (quasi-)mereology of topics [7, 5]. More precisely, according to this logic, Iφψ is true at w when: (TC) ψ is true at all worlds w′ accessible via the set-selection function determined by φ. (AP) ψ is fully on topic with respect to φ.
The truth-conditional component (TC) makes Iφψ a variably strict quantifier over worlds, similar to a Lewis-Stalnaker-style conditional operator. The aboutness preservation component (AP) requires that the topic of the output of an imaginative episode be contained in the topic of the input. In other words, the topic of the imagined output can never go beyond the topic of the input that triggers the imaginative exercise.
In this talk, I will critically examine both TC and AP, identify some problems, and argue that there are reasons to weaken or revise both. I will propose weakening AP by introducing a topological closure or a more general, weaker algebraic operator (as developed in [11], joint work with A.J. Cotnoir). In light of this revision to AP, I will reconsider TC and put forward a few tentative suggestions for revising the truth-conditional component to achieve a more plausible formalization of imagination (based on ongoing joint work with Tianyi Chu and Tom Schoonen).
References
[1] Berto, F. (2018) Aboutness in imagination. Philosophical Studies, 175, 1871–1886. [2] Berto, F. (2018) Taming the runabout imagination ticket. Synthese, 198, 2029–2043.