2025-2028 Leverhulme Trust grant for the project What if…? Knowing by Imagining (WIKI), PI Franz Berto, funded with 500,000 pounds.
‘What if?’-counterfactual questions are of momentous importance for scientific explanations (Would we see that particle track if the atom was ionized?), to ascertain responsibilities (Would he have hit the brakes, had he not been distracted?), to choose what to do (Would I get to the other side if I jumped the stream?). We address them by imagining that a hypothetical situation obtains and wondering what would follow.
But how can imagination give us knowledge of reality, if it’s free departure from reality? WIKI will apply in the philosophy of imagination tools from formal epistemology, in particular epistemic and probabilistic logic, to address this issue. If we start by taking counterfactual imagination as a kind of simulated belief revision, we can then analyse it using formal theories of belief revision, in qualitative (focusing on full, all-or-nothing belief) and quantitative clothing (focusing on credences/degrees of belief).
In three interrelated sub-projects funded by the Leverhulme Trust, WIKI will (1) develop a logic and formal epistemology of imagination as suppositional thinking, (2) apply them to analyse the workings of scientific thought experiments, and (3) compare them to empirical results from the psychology of reasoning, to provide an account of how we can become better hypothetical reasoners.
Download the full description of the WIKI project here.
WIKI seminar, Sem. 2, 2025, Mondays 3-5 in Edgecliffe G03
| Date | Topic | Presenter | Reading |
| Apr 7 | Knowing by Imagining: Introducing WIKI | Franz | None |
| Apr14 | Intro to Probabilities and Conditionalization | Miriam | Titelbaum, Fundamentals of Bayesian Epistemology 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3 and Chapter 4, Oxford University Press 2022 |
| Apr 21 | Intro to Epistemic Logic as Modal Logic, AGM, basic DEL | Soroush | Van Benthem & Smets, ‘ Dynamic Logics of Belief Change’ , sect 7.1-7.4, in Handbook of Epistemic Logic, College Publications 2015. |
| Apr 28 | NOPE [departmental Teaching Away Day] | – | – |
| May 5 | NOPE [Bank Holiday, Uni is closed] | – | – |
| May 12 | P(A -> B) = P(B|A)?
The Equation, and How Lewis Broke It |
Franz | Lewis, ‘Probabilities of Conditionals and Conditional Probabilities’,
Philosophical Review 1976. |
| May 19 | NOPE [Soroush & Franz in NL for conferences] | – | – |
| May 26 | Accuracy Arguments, Dutch Books, and the rational management of credences | Miriam and/or Soroush | Pettigrew, Accuracy and the Laws of Credence, chapters 1, 3, and 4, Oxford University Press, 2016
Williamson, Lectures on Inductive Logic, sect 9.2, Oxford University Press, 2017 Paris, The Uncertain Reasoner’s Companion A Mathematical Perspective, pages 17-23, Cambridge University Press, 2009 |
| Jun 2 | How Ramsey Tests Work | Franz | Franz, ‘How Ramsey Tests Work’, draft, will circulate. |
| Jun 9 | AGM vs KGM and their modal recapture
|
Soroush | Main: Grahne, ‘Updates and Counterfactuals’, Journal of Logic and Computation 1998.
Secondary: Leitgeb & Segerberg, ‘Dynamic doxastic logic: why, how, and where to?’, Synthese 2007. |
| Jun 16 | TBA
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TBA | TBA |
| Jun 23 | TBA
|
TBA | TBA |
| Jun 30 | TBA
|
Aybüke Özgün (ILLC, Amsterdam) | TBA |
Postdoctoral Research Fellow: Soroush Rafiee Rad
Principal Investigator: Franz Berto
Members: Greg Restall, Jessica Brown, Cecily Whiteley, Miriam Bowen, Petronella Randell
Research students: Francisca Silva, Sophie Nagler, Sabina Dominguez Parrado, Giulia Schirripa, Matthew Green, Pak Him Lai
Associated news
WIKI project funded with 500K pounds by the Leverhulme Trust