2025-2028 Leverhulme Trust grant for the project What if…? Knowing by Imagining (WIKI).
‘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).
Funded by the Leverhulme Trust, WIKI will develop a logic and a formal epistemology of imagination as suppositional thinking, apply them to analyse the workings of scientific thought experiments, and provide an account of how we can become better hypothetical reasoners.
Download the full description of the WIKI project here.
WIKI Team
Principal Investigator: Franz Berto
Postdoctoral Research Fellow: Petronella Randell
Postroctoral Research Fellow: Soroush Rafiee Rad
Teaching Fellow: Alessandro Rossi
WIKI Steering Committee
Dr. Margherita Arcangeli (EHESS, Jean Nicod)
Prof. Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna)
Prof. Graham Priest (CUNY)
WIKI outputs
- L. Hornischer & F. Berto, ‘The Logic of Dynamical Systems is Relevant’, Mind 2025, Open Access here.
- F. Berto, ‘Saying the Same Thing’, Erkenntnis 2025, Open Access here.
- F. Berto, ‘The Ramsey Test for Counterfactuals Is a Consistent ‘Heuristic”, Ergo, forthcoming 2026, preprint here.
- S. Rafiee Rad, J. Williamson and J. Landes, ‘A decidable class of inferences in first-order objective Bayesian inductive logic’, Annals of Pure and Applied Logic, forthcoming 2026.
- F. Berto & A. Özgün, ‘The Method of Thought Experiments: Probability and Counterfactuals’, Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming 2026, download here.
WIKI seminar, Sem 1 2025-26, Mondays 3-5 in Edgecliffe G03
| Oct 6
|
No seminar |
| Oct 13
|
Reading session [Ethan]: How Should your Beliefs Change When your Awareness Grows? |
| Oct 27
|
Reading session [Soroush]: Explainable AI and counterfactual reasoning
The Intriguing Relation Between Counterfactual Explanations and Adversarial Examples Explainable AI and Causal Understanding: Counterfactual Approaches Considered |
| Nov 3
|
Franz Berto: Counterfactual Knowledge and Inference to the Best Explanation |
| Nov 10
|
No seminar |
| Nov 17
|
Awareness Logic [Soroush]
Ch. 3 of Handbook of Epistemic Logic |
| Nov 24
|
Ethan Lai: Topic-Sensitive Knowledge Without Grasp |
| Dec 1
|
Evidential Decision Theory [Soroush]
Ch. 2 of Open Handbook of Formal Epistemology |
| Dec 8
|
Matthew Vermaire: Jamesian Goalkeeping |
| Dec 22
|
Elias Yuan: Justification Logic |
WIKI seminar, Sem 2 2024-25, 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 | This session has been rescheduled to June 23 | – | – |
| Jun 2 | Imaging, Williamson, and ‘Heuristics’ | Franz | Franz, ‘The Ramsey Test for Counterfactuals is a Consistent ‘Heuristic’, 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 | 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 23 | That’s Not Ideal
|
Miriam | None |
| Jun 30 | Rethinking Logics of Imagination | Aybüke Özgün (ILLC, Amsterdam) | None |
Postdoctoral Research Fellows: Soroush Rafiee Rad, Petronella Randell
Principal Investigator: Franz Berto
Members: Greg Restall, Jessica Brown, Cecily Whiteley, Miriam Bowen
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