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

by Francesco Berto (Author)

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.

Author Biography

Francesco Berto, Chair of Logic and Metaphysics, Department of Philosophy and Arché Research Centre, University of St Andrews

Francesco Berto is Chair of Logic and Metaphysics at the Department of Philosophy and the Arché Research Centre at the University of St Andrews, and also works at the Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC) of the University of Amsterdam. He has worked at the Universities of Notre Dame, Aberdeen, Venice, Padua, Milan-San Raffaele, Lugano, and at the Sorbonne-Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. He writes on ontology, logic, epistemology, and the philosophy of computation. He is the editor-in-chief of The Philosophical Quarterly.