Abstract
In Berto’s logic for aboutness in imagination, the output content of an imaginative episode must be part of the initial content of the episode (Berto, Philos Stud 175:1871–1886, 2018). This condition predicts expressions of perfectly legitimate imaginative episodes to be false. Thus, this condition is too strict. Relaxing the condition to correctly model these cases requires to consider a language with predicates and constants. The paper extends Berto’s semantics for aboutness in imagination to a semantics for such a language. The new semantics models contents of formulas along the lines of Hawke’s issue-based theory of topics (Hawke, Australas J Philos 96:697–723, 2017), while remaining faithful to the (in)validities discussed by Berto. Several relations between issues and topics are defined, which allow to overcome shortcomings of Hawke’s initial framework. These relations are then discussed with respect to their usefulness in the truth condition for the imagination operator.
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Acknowledgements
Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL. Various versions of this paper have been presented at the workshop Logic(s) for Imagination (2018), the conference Logic in Bochum V (2019), both at the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany; the workshop Fiction and Proper Names (2018) at the Institute of Philosophy of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava, Slovakia; the workshop On What There Isn’t (2019) at the Heinrich-Heine University Düsseldorf, Germany; and at the Logic of Conceivability (2019) seminar at the ILLC, Amsterdam. I thank all participants of these events for their valuable feedback, especially Peter Hawke for his helpful comments on a previous version of this paper. Moreover, I am grateful to Franz Berto and Heinrich Wansing. Without their support and extensive feedback, this paper would have remained imaginary.
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This research has been funded by the Ruhr University Research School PLUS, funded by Germany’s Excellence Initiative [DFG GSC 98/3]. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for their critical comments.
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Badura, C. More Aboutness in Imagination. J Philos Logic 50, 523–547 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-020-09575-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10992-020-09575-4