He develops a scrutability thesis saying that all truths about the world can be derived from basic truths and ideal reasoning. Chalmers argues that the world can be constructed from a few basic elements. Inspired by Rudolf Carnap's Der Logische Aufbau Der Welt, David J. Effectively, I show that attempts to model moderately ideal agents in a world-involving framework collapse to modeling either logical omniscient agents, or extremely non-ideal agents. But I prove that it is impossible to develop an impossible- world framework that can do this job and that satisfies certain standard conditions. To model moderately ideal agents, I argue, the job is to construct a modal space that contains only possible and non-trivially impossible worlds where it is not the case that “anything goes”. Intuitively, while such agents may fail to rule out subtly impossible worlds that verify complex logical falsehoods, they are nevertheless able to rule out blatantly impossible worlds that verify obvious logical falsehoods. A much harder, and considerably less investigated challenge is to ensure that the resulting modal space can also be used to model moderately ideal agents that are not logically omniscient but nevertheless logically competent. ) agents that are incapable of performing even the most elementary logical deductions. As we shall see, if we admit impossible worlds where “anything goes” in modal space, it is easy to model extremely non-ideal (. A familiar attempt to overcome this problem centers around the use of impossible worlds where the truths of logic can be false. The standard possible- world framework falters in this respect because of a commitment to logical omniscience.
In this paper, I investigate whether we can use a world-involving framework to model the epistemic states of non-ideal agents. Constructing impossible worlds, it turns out, requires novel metaphysical resources. Nor can they be ersatz worlds on the model proposed by Melia or Sider. I'll argue that impossible worlds cannot be genuine worlds, of the kind proposed by Lewis, McDaniel or Yagisawa. So what are impossible worlds? Graham Priest claims that any of the usual stories about possible worlds can be told about impossible worlds, too.
But to function well, all these accounts need use of impossible and as well (. A worlds-based story may also provide the best semantics for counterfactuals. As it happens, a worlds-based account provides the best philosophical story about semantic content, knowledge and belief states, cognitive significance and cognitive information, and informative deductive reasoning. They earn their keep in a semantic or metaphysical theory if they do the right theoretical work for us. Impossible worlds are representations of impossible things and impossible happenings. 10 hints at possible developments of the theory in the direction of two-dimensional semantics. Section 9 examines the effects of importing false beliefs into the imagined scenarios. Section 8 describes some welcome invalidities. Section 7 proposes additional constraints on the semantics, validating further inferences. Section 6 deals with how imagination under-determines the represented contents. Section 5 argues that imagination has a minimal mereological structure validating some logical inferences. Section 4 introduces the formal semantics. Section 3 proposes to model imagination via variably strict world quantifiers. Section 1 sets the stage and impossible worlds are quickly introduced in Sect. Imagination turns out to be highly hyperintensional, but not logically anarchic. The latter secure lack of classical logical closure for the relevant mental states, while the variability of strictness captures how the agent imports information from actuality in the (. I propose to capture imagination, so understood, via variably strict world quantifiers, in a modal framework including both possible and so-called impossible worlds.
I want to model a finite, fallible cognitive agent who imagines that p in the sense of mentally representing a scenario-a configuration of objects and properties-correctly described by p.