Aboutness in imagination
Abstract
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.
Citation
Berto , F 2018 , ' Aboutness in imagination ' , Philosophical Studies , vol. 175 , no. 8 , pp. 1871-1886 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0937-y
Publication
Philosophical Studies
Status
Peer reviewed
ISSN
0031-8116Type
Journal article
Collections
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