Author Description
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 topic: 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 topic: 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.
Menrva's Summary
THE THESIS
This book investigates the logical structure of propositional thought by proposing a hyperintensional account that individuates contents based on their topics. Francesco Berto, a professor of philosophy, utilizes formal logic to argue that the traditional possible-worlds framework is insufficient for capturing the intentionality of mental states. He constructs a formal system where the 'topic' of a thought—what it is about—serves as a primary component of its logical identity, providing a new foundation for modeling human cognition.
THE SCOPE MAP
What You Will Find
- A formal hyperintensional framework for propositional content
- Epistemic, doxastic, probabilistic, and conditional logical systems
- Applications to belief revision and framing effects
- Analysis of dogmatism, skepticism, and epistemic fallibilism
Scope Limits
- The text does not provide an empirical psychological study of human thought processes
- It does not cover non-propositional forms of mental states or consciousness
THE AUTHORITY PERSPECTIVE
Experts in formal logic and analytic philosophy identify this work as a rigorous contribution to hyperintensional semantics. Readers frequently note the high level of technical density, requiring a strong background in symbolic logic to fully engage with the proposed systems.
Page Count:
240
Publication Date:
2022-11-25
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
ISBN-10:
0192857495
ISBN-13:
9780192857491
Philosophy
Logic
Epistemology
Metaphysics
Knowledge Theory