Aboutness in imagination

Francesco Berto*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

48 Citations (Scopus)
14 Downloads (Pure)

Abstract

I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is natural to extend it to intentional states. The proposed framework combines a modal semantics with a mereology of contents: imagination operators are understood as variably strict quantifiers over worlds with a content-preservation constraint.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1871-1886
Number of pages16
JournalPhilosophical Studies
Volume175
Issue number8
Early online date7 Jun 2017
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - Aug 2018

Keywords

  • Aboutness
  • Content-preserving entailment
  • Intentionality
  • Logic of imagination

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