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. We need to understand the impossible.
Francesco Berto and Mark Jago start by considering what the concepts
of meaning, information, knowledge, belief, fiction, conditionality,
and counterfactual supposition have in common. They are all concepts
which divide the world up more finely than logic does. Logically
equivalent sentences may carry different meanings and information and
may differ in how they're believed. Fictions can be inconsistent yet
meaningful. We can suppose impossible things without collapsing into
total incoherence. Yet for the leading philosophical theories of
meaning, these phenomena are an unfathomable mystery. To understand
these concepts, we need a metaphysical, logical, and conceptual grasp
of situations that could not possibly exist: _Impossible Worlds_. This
book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies the
concept to a range of central topics and open issues in logic,
semantics, and philosophy. It considers problems in the logic of
knowledge, the meaning of alternative logics, models of imagination
and mental simulation, the theory of information, truth in fiction,
the meaning of conditional statements, and reasoning about the
impossible. In all these cases, impossible worlds have an essential
role to play.
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780192540980
Publisert
2022
Utgiver
Vendor
OUP Oxford
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter