We study imagination as reality-oriented mental simulation (ROMS): the activity of simulating nonactual scenarios in one’s mind, to investigate what would happen if they were realized. Three connected questions concerning ROMS are: What is the logic, if there is one, of such an activity? How can we gain new knowledge via it? What is voluntary in it and what is not? We address them by building a list of core features of imagination as ROMS, drawing on research in cognitive psychology and the philosophy of mind. We then provide a logic of imagination as ROMS which models such features, combining techniques from epistemic logic, action logic, and subject matter semantics. Our logic comprises a modal propositional language with non-monotonic imagination operators, a formal semantics, and an axiomatization.

我们将想象力研究为面向现实的心理模拟 (ROMS)：在一个人的脑海中模拟非现实场景的活动，以研究如果它们被实现会发生什么。关于 ROMS 的三个相关问题是：如果有的话，这种活动的逻辑是什么？我们如何通过它获得新知识？什么是自愿的，什么不是？我们通过利用认知心理学和心灵哲学的研究，将想象的核心特征列表构建为 ROMS 来解决这些问题。然后，我们提供了一个想象逻辑作为 ROMS，它对这些特征进行建模，结合了认知逻辑、动作逻辑和主题语义的技术。我们的逻辑包括具有非单调想象运算符的模态命题语言、形式语义和公理化。