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Impossible Worlds

Francesco Berto, Mark Jago

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We need to understand the impossible. Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality, and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet meaningful. We can suppose impossible things without collapsing into total incoherence. Yet for the leading philosophical theories of meaning, these phenomena are an unfathomable mystery. To understand these concepts, we need a metaphysical, logical, and conceptual grasp of situations that could not possibly exist: Impossible Worlds. This book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies the concept to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy. It considers problems in the logic of knowledge, the meaning of alternative logics, models of imagination and mental simulation, the theory of information, truth in fiction, the meaning of conditional statements, and reasoning about the impossible. In all these cases, impossible worlds have an essential role to play.

GenresPhilosophy

323 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 2019

About the author

Francesco Berto

21 books12 followers

Francesco Berto (Venezia, 1973) è un filosofo, logico e accademico italiano. E' structural chair all’Institute for Logic, Language and Computation dell’Università di Amsterdam. È stato senior lecturer al Northern Institute of Philosophy di Crispin Wright (University of Aberdeen, UK), research fellow all’Institute for Advanced Study (University of Notre Dame, USA), Chaire d’Excellence fellow alla Sorbona e ha insegnato ontologia all’Ecole Normale Supérieure di Parigi, logica alle università di Venezia, Padova e Milano-San Raffaele. Ha diretto progetti di ricerca per il Research Council of the United Kingdom (‘The Metaphysical Basis of Logic’) e per lo European Research Council (‘The Logic of Conceivability’). Ha pubblicato numerosi articoli e volumi di logica e ontologia, fra cui Impossible Worlds (Oxford University Press), Ontology and Metaontology (Bloomsbury), Existence as a Real Property (Synthese Library), There’s Something about Gödel (Blackwell). Cura tre voci della Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

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