Talk: Aybüke Özgün (Amsterdam)

Title:

Imagination, Mereotopology, and Topic Expansion

Abstract:

Intentional modals have recently received topic-sensitive treatment. One application involves the logic of imagination. According to a prominent treatment by Berto (2018, 2022), the topic of the imaginative output must be contained within the topic of the imaginative input. That is, imaginative episodes can never expand what they are about. We argue that this constraint is implausible from a psychological point of view, and it wrongly predicts the falsehood of true reports of imagination. Thus the constraint should be relaxed; but how? In this work, we explore a number of direct approaches to relaxing the controversial content-inclusion constraint. The core idea is to consider adding an expansion operator to the mereology of topics. The logic that results depends on the formal constraints placed on topic expansion, the choice of which are subject to philosophical dispute. The first semantics we explore is a topological approach using a closure operator. The second approach uses an inclusive and monotone increasing operator, and we give a sound and complete axiomatisation for its logic. The third approach uses an inclusive and additive operator, and we show that the associated logic is strictly weaker than the previous two systems.

Time permitting, I will also elaborate on the applications of the proposed topic expansion operators to conditionals; as well as further generalizations of the possible worlds component of the topic-sensitive semantics of imagination.

The main part of this talk is based on joint work with Aaron J. Cotnoir.