Topics of Thought: The Logic of Knowledge, Belief, Imagination

by Francesco Berto

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations.

When one thinks--knows, believes, imagines--that something is the case, one's thought has a it is about something, towards which one's mind is directed. What is the logic of thought, so understood? This book begins to explore the idea that, to answer the question, we should take topics seriously. It proposes a hyperintensional account of the propositional contents of thought, arguing that these are individuated not only by the set of possible worlds at which they are true, but also by their what they are about. The book then builds epistemic, doxastic, probabilistic, and conditional logics based on this view. It applies them to issues ranging from dogmatism, scepticism, and epistemic fallibilism, to imagination and suppositional reasoning, belief revision, framing effects, and the acceptability of indicative conditionals.

241 pages, Hardcover

Published November 25, 2022

About the author

Francesco Berto (Venezia, 1973) è un filosofo, logico e accademico italiano. E' structural chair all’Institute for Logic, Language and Computation dell’Università di Amsterdam. È stato senior lecturer al Northern Institute of Philosophy di Crispin Wright (University of Aberdeen, UK), research fellow all’Institute for Advanced Study (University of Notre Dame, USA), Chaire d’Excellence fellow alla Sorbona e ha insegnato ontologia all’Ecole Normale Supérieure di Parigi, logica alle università di Venezia, Padova e Milano-San Raffaele. Ha diretto progetti di ricerca per il Research Council of the United Kingdom (‘The Metaphysical Basis of Logic’) e per lo European Research Council (‘The Logic of Conceivability’). Ha pubblicato numerosi articoli e volumi di logica e ontologia, fra cui Impossible Worlds (Oxford University Press), Ontology and Metaontology (Bloomsbury), Existence as a Real Property (Synthese Library), There’s Something about Gödel (Blackwell). Cura tre voci della Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.