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    Impossible Worlds

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    Author(s)
    Berto, Francesco
    Jago, Mark
    Collection
    European Research Council (ERC); EU collection
    Language
    English
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    Abstract
    The latter half of the 20th Century witnessed an ‘intensional revolution’: a great collective effort to analyse notions which are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world and of ourselves – from meaning and information to knowledge, belief, causation, essence, supervenience, conditionality, as well as nomological, metaphysical, and logical necessity – in terms of a single concept. This was the concept of a possible world: a way things could have been. Possible worlds found applications in logic, metaphysics, semantics, game theory, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind and cognition. However, possible worlds analyses have been facing numerous problems. This book traces them all back to hyperintensionality: the need for distinctions more fine-grained than the possible worlds apparatus can easily represent. It then introduces impossible worlds – ways things could not have been – as a general tool for modelling hyperintensional phenomena. The book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies them to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy: from the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic, to the semantics of non-classical logics, the modeling of imagination and mental simulation, the analysis of information and informative inference, truth in fiction, and counterpossible reasoning. The latter half of the 20th Century witnessed an ‘intensional revolution’: a great collective effort to analyse notions which are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world and of ourselves – from meaning and information to knowledge, belief, causation, essence, supervenience, conditionality, as well as nomological, metaphysical, and logical necessity – in terms of a single concept. This was the concept of a possible world: a way things could have been. Possible worlds found applications in logic, metaphysics, semantics, game theory, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind and cognition. However, possible worlds analyses have been facing numerous problems. This book traces them all back to hyperintensionality: the need for distinctions more fine-grained than the possible worlds apparatus can easily represent. It then introduces impossible worlds – ways things could not have been – as a general tool for modelling hyperintensional phenomena. The book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies them to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy: from the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic, to the semantics of non-classical logics, the modeling of imagination and mental simulation, the analysis of information and informative inference, truth in fiction, and counterpossible reasoning.
    URI
    http://library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/25055
    Keywords
    Hyperintensionality; Impossible worlds; Metaphysics; Epistemic logic; Logical omniscience; Imagination; Information; Non-classical logic; Fiction; Counterpossible reasoning
    DOI
    10.1093/0198812795.001.0001
    OCN
    1103218023
    Publisher
    Oxford University Press
    Publisher website
    https://global.oup.com/
    Publication date and place
    Oxford, UK, 2019
    Grantor
    • H2020 European Research Council - 681404 - LoC Research grant informationFind all documents
    Classification
    Philosophy: metaphysics and ontology
    Philosophy: logic
    Pages
    336
    Rights
    http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
    • Imported or submitted locally

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    • If not noted otherwise all contents are available under Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

    Credits

    • logo EU
    • This project received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 683680, 810640, 871069 and 964352.

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