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VOLUNTARY IMAGINATION: A FINE-GRAINED ANALYSIS

Part of: General logic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 June 2020

ILARIA CANAVOTTO ,
FRANCESCO BERTO  and
ALESSANDRO GIORDANI
ILARIA CANAVOTTO
Affiliation:
INSTITUTE FOR LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND COMPUTATION UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM 1098 XG AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDSE-mail: i.canavotto@uva.nl
FRANCESCO BERTO
Affiliation:
ARCHÉ UNIVERSITY OF ST. ANDREWS ST. ANDREWS KY16 9AJ, UNITED KINGDOM and INSTITUTE FOR LOGIC, LANGUAGE AND COMPUTATION UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM 1098 XG AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDSE-mail: fb96@st-andrews.ac.uk
ALESSANDRO GIORDANI
Affiliation:
DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF MILAN LARGO AGOSTINO GEMELLI 1, 20123 MILANO, ITALYE-mail: alessandro.giordani@unicatt.it
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

logic of imaginationepistemology of imaginationreality-oriented mental simulationaboutnesstopic sensitive operatorscompleteness

MSC classification

Primary: 03B42: Logics of knowledge and belief (including belief change)
Secondary: 03B45: Modal logic (including the logic of norms)
Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 15 , Issue 2 , June 2022 , pp. 362 - 387
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Association for Symbolic Logic

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