More Aboutness in Imagination
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More Aboutness in Imagination Christopher Badura1 Received: 8 October 2019 / Accepted: 13 September 2020 / © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In Berto’s logic for aboutness in imagination, the output content of an imaginative episode must be part of the initial content of the episode (Berto, Philos Stud 175:1871–1886, 2018). This condition predicts expressions of perfectly legitimate imaginative episodes to be false. Thus, this condition is too strict. Relaxing the condition to correctly model these cases requires to consider a language with predicates and constants. The paper extends Berto’s semantics for aboutness in imagination to a semantics for such a language. The new semantics models contents of formulas along the lines of Hawke’s issue-based theory of topics (Hawke, Australas J Philos 96:697– 723, 2017), while remaining faithful to the (in)validities discussed by Berto. Several relations between issues and topics are defined, which allow to overcome shortcomings of Hawke’s initial framework. These relations are then discussed with respect to their usefulness in the truth condition for the imagination operator. Keywords Imagination · Conditional logic · Aboutness · Predicate logic
1 Introduction Francesco Berto has proposed a logic for aboutness in imagination [1].1 He aims to model rational imagination realistically, which he takes to be a kind of mental simulation having an input content and an output content. Imagination thus understood is
1 On his account, the content of a sentence is what the sentence is about, i.e., aboutness is a relation between sentences and contents. Except for their mereological behaviour, Berto doesn’t say much more about what kind of thing contents are. I will get back to that in a few paragraphs. This research has been funded by the Ruhr University Research School PLUS, funded by Germany’s Excellence Initiative [DFG GSC 98/3]. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for their critical comments.
Christopher Badura
[email protected] 1
Ruhr University Bochum, Institute for Philosophy I, GA 3/37, Universit¨atsstraße 150, 44801, Bochum, Germany
C. Badura
rational because it satisfies some logical validities, e.g., imagining that B and imagining that C entails imagining that B ∧ C. It is modelled realistically because agents do not end up imagining all logical consequences of what they start out to imagine. In particular, imagination is hyperintensional. The uses of the rational imagination as mental simulation Berto is concerned with are expressed by “In imagining (content expressed by) A, the agent also imagines (content expressed by) B”.2 The formal notation for this is [A]B, and I call formulas of this form “imagination-formulas”.3 The content expressed by A is the initial content and the content expressed by B is the output content. The truth condition Berto proposes for sentences of this form is conjunctive. The first conjunct requires that if a world w is accessed by the formula expressing the initial content, then the formula expressing the output content is true at w.
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