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Impossible worlds

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Impossible_Worlds_OUP.pdf (1.475Mb)
Date
13/06/2019
Author
Berto, Francesco
Jago, Mark
Funder
European Research Council
Grant ID
681404
Keywords
Hyperintensionality
Impossible worlds
Metaphysics
Epistemic logic
Logical omiscience
Imagination
Information
Non-classical logic
Fiction
Counterpossible reasoning
BC Logic
BDC
R2C
~DC~
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Abstract
The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed an ‘intensional revolution’, a great collective effort to analyse notions which are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world and of ourselves—from meaning and information to knowledge, belief, causation, essence, supervenience, conditionality, as well as nomological, metaphysical, and logical necessity—in terms of a single concept. This was the concept of a possible world: a way things could have been. Possible worlds found applications in logic, metaphysics, semantics, game theory, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind and cognition. However, possible worlds analyses have been facing numerous problems. This book traces them all back to hyperintensionality: the need for distinctions more fine-grained than the possible worlds apparatus can easily represent. It then introduces impossible worlds—ways things could not have been—as a general tool for modelling hyperintensional phenomena. The book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies them to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy: from the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic, to the semantics of non-classical logics, the modelling of imagination and mental simulation, the analysis of information and informative inference, truth in fiction, and counterpossible reasoning.
Citation
Berto , F & Jago , M 2019 , Impossible worlds . Oxford University Press , Oxford; New York . https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812791.001.0001
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198812791.001.0001
Type
Book
Rights
© Francesco Berto and Mark Jago 2019. This is an open access publication, available online and distributed under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution–Non Commercial–No Derivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), a copy of which is available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
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  • University of St Andrews Research
URL
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/impossible-worlds-9780198812791?cc=gb&lang=en&#
https://discover.libraryhub.jisc.ac.uk/search?q=Impossible%20worlds&rn=1
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/18355

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