Aboutness in Imagination

Open Access
Authors
Publication date 08-2018
Journal Philosophical Studies
Volume | Issue number 175 | 8
Pages (from-to) 1871–1886
Number of pages 16
Organisations
  • Interfacultary Research - Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
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.
Document type Article
Language English
Published at https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-017-0937-y
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Aboutness in Imagination (Final published version)
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