Francesco Berto

Existence as a real property : the ontology of Meinongianism

Prologue: Much Ado About Nothing.- Acknowledgments.- Existence as Logic.- Chapter 1. The Paradox of Non-Being.- Chapter 2. To Exist and to Count.- Chapter 3. Troubles for the Received View.- Nonexistence.- Chapter 4. Existence As a Real Property.- Chapter 5. Naive Meinongianism.- Chapter 6. Meinongianisms of The First, Second, and Third Kind.- Close Encounters (with Nonexistents) of the Third Kind.- Chapter 7. Conceiving the Impossible.- Chapter 8. Nonexistents of The Third Kind at Work.- Chapter 9. Open Problems.- References.- Index.

Existence As a Real Property

What does existence consist in, if it is not what the Parmenidean takes it to be? Here comes a non-Parmenidean approach. To begin with, “exists” is a predicate of individuals just like the others – a predicate for real, not only from the point of view of our ordinary language’s surface grammar. It is a predicate in the same sense that “eats”, “flies”, and “is a man” are. The modo materiali, ontological counterpart of the semantic thesis, is that existence is a genuine, non-blanket property of individuals, just as the properties of eating, flying, being a man.

Άδύνατον and material exclusion 1

Philosophical dialetheism, whose main exponent is Graham Priest, claims that some contradictions hold, are true, and it is rational to accept and assert them. Such a position is naturally portrayed as a challenge to the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC). But all the classic formulations of the LNC are, in a sense, not questioned by a typical dialetheist, since she is (cheerfully) required to accept them by her own theory. The goal of this paper is to develop a formulation of the Law which appears to be unquestionable, in the sense that the Priestian dialetheist is committed to accept it without also accepting something inconsistent with it, on pain of trivialism—that is to say, on pain of lapsing into the position according to which everything is the case. This will be achieved via (a) a discussion of Priests dialetheic treatment of the notions of rejection and denial; and (b) the characterization of a negation via the primitive intuition of content exclusion. Such a result will not constitute a cheap victory for the friends of consistency. We may just learn that different things have been historically conflated under the label of ‘Law of Non-Contradiction’; that dialetheists rightly attack some formulations of the Law, and orthodox logicians and philosophers have been mistaken in assimilating them to the indisputable one.

Williamson on counterpossibles

A counterpossible conditional is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Common sense delivers the view that some such conditionals are true, and some are false. In recent publications, Timothy Williamson has defended the view that all are true. In this paper we defend the common sense view against Williamson’s objections.

Aboutness in imagination

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.

Conceivability and possibility: some dilemmas for Humeans

The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language. If the conceivability of P amounts to the pictorial imaginability of a situation verifying P, then the question is whether the imagination at issue works purely qualitatively, that is, only by phenomenological resemblance with the imagined scenario. If so, the range of situations imaginable in this way is too limited to have a significant role in modal epistemology. If not, imagination will involve some arbitrary labeling component, which turns out to be sufficient for imagining the impossible. And if the relevant imagination is neither linguistic nor pictorial, Humeans will appear to resort to some representational magic, until they come up with a theory of a ‘third code’ for mental representations.

Simple Hyperintensional Belief Revision

I present a possible worlds semantics for a hyperintensional belief revision operator, which reduces the logical idealization of cognitive agents affecting similar operators in doxastic and epistemic logics, as well as in standard AGM belief revision theory. (Revised) belief states are not closed under classical logical consequence; revising by inconsistent information does not perforce lead to trivialization; and revision can be subject to ‘framing effects’: logically or necessarily equivalent contents can lead to different revisions. Such results are obtained without resorting to non-classical logics, or to non-normal or impossible worlds semantics. The framework combines, instead, a standard semantics for propositional S5 with a simple mereology of contents.

Review of Errors of Reasoning. Naturalizing the Logic of Inference, by John Woods.

John Woods’ Errors of Reasoning (EoR) flies in the face of logical orthodoxy in an astonishing number of ways. Its 550 pages make numerous claims on a great many subjects. Due to space limitations, this review will focus only on some of them. I nevertheless hope to give the general flavour of this thought-provoking book. The official core topic of EoR is the one of logical fallacies. And the core claim is a critical one: the traditional theory of fallacies is radically wrong. But the background for this bold negative statement is a sophisticated and highly revisionary philosophical view of human reasoning. Such a view, it seems to me, is the most interesting aspect of the book, its critique of traditional fallacy theory being, in a sense, but its main local application. I will begin by explaining the gist of Woods’ critical claim on fallacies. I will then explore the background approach inspiring Woods’ stance, which occupies, roughly, EoR’s first half. Finally, I will give an example of the strategies used by Woods to substantiate the critical claim via the background view. The heart of Woods’ critique lies in what he calls the concept-list misalignment thesis (p. 6). He identifies a mainstream concept of logical fallacy and a list of items traditionally labelled as fallacies. He then shows via a detailed case-by-case investigation how most of the items in the list do not belong in the extension of the concept. As for the targeted concept, it is called the EAUI (read it as ‘Yowee’: p. 135) concept of logical fallacy: fallacies are Errors of reasoning, which are Attractive to reasoners (in that they easily fall prey of them), Universal (i.e., extremely common) and Incorrigible (even after the given fallacy’s fallacious nature has been explained to the reasoner, s/he is still prone to commit it). As for the list considered in EoR, it includes traditional deductive and inductive fallacies like ad baculum, ad hominem, ad populum, ad ignorantiam, ad verecundiam, affirming the consequent, denying the antecedent, hasty generalization, equivocation or quaternio terminorum, the gambler’s fallacy and post hoc ergo propter hoc. The EAUI conception gives a conjunctive characterization, so Woods has a disjunctive task: of each targeted (would-be-)fallacy, show that, contrary to tradition, it is either not attractive, or not universal, or not incorrigible—or, not an error. This last bit takes us to Woods’ second, possibly even more interesting claim on fallacies after concept-list misalignment: EoR’s cognitive virtue thesis (p. 7) has it that most of the traditional fallacies should not be labelled as errors, but are, on the contrary, virtuous ways of reasoning. Now one expects what Lewis called ‘incredulous stares’: how can denying the antecedent or ad ignorantiam not be logical mistakes? There is no way for ‘If A then B’ and not-A to entail not-B, or for ‘There’s no evidence that not-A’ to entail A, in any logically decent sense of ‘entail’. But according to Woods, much mainstream logic has got the standards of logical decency wrong: he calls, in fact, for a rethinking of what counts as error in human reasoning. The alternative view of reasoning and its errors proposed by Woods to substantiate his conceptlist misalignment and cognitive virtue theses is based on a broad and ambitious naturalization project, introduced in Chapter I and expanded to specific topics mostly in Chapters II to V. This is inspired by a number of traditions neglected or left under-developed within the mainstream 20th Century logic, ranging from naturalized epistemology to cognitive science and to some

Taming the runabout imagination ticket

The ‘puzzle of imaginative use’ (Kind and Kung in Knowledge through imagination, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016) asks: given that imagination is arbitrary escape from reality, how can it have any epistemic value? In particular, imagination seems to be logically anarchic, like a runabout inference ticket: one who imagines A may also imagine whatever B pops to one’s mind by free mental association. This paper argues that at least a certain kind of imaginative exercise—reality-oriented mental simulation—is not logically anarchic. Showing this is part of the task of solving the puzzle. Six plausible features of imagination, so understood, are listed. Then a formal semantics is provided, whose patterns of logical validity and invalidity model the six features.

Truth in fiction, impossible worlds, and belief revision

ABSTRACT We present a theory of truth in fiction that improves on Lewiss [1978] ‘Analysis 2’ in two ways. First, we expand Lewiss possible worlds apparatus by adding non-normal or impossible worlds. Second, we model truth in fiction as (make-believed) belief revision via ideas from dynamic epistemic logic. We explain the major objections raised against Lewiss original view and show that our theory overcomes them.