2025-2028 Leverhulme Trust grant for the project What if…? Knowing by Imagining (WIKI), PI Franz Berto.
‘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 Steering Committee
Dr. Margherita Arcangeli (EHESS, Jean Nicod)
Prof. Amy Kind (Claremont McKenna)
Prof. Graham Priest (CUNY)
WIKI outputs
- F. Berto & A. Özgün, ‘The Method of Thought Experiments: Probability and Counterfactuals’, Journal of Philosophy 2025, download here.
- 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 2025, Preprint here.
WIKI seminar, Nov-Dec 2025, Mondays 3-5 in Edgecliffe G03
| Date | Topic | Presenter | Reading |
| Oct 13 | Reading session: Belief Change and Awareness | Ethan | How Should your Beliefs Change When your Awareness Grows? |
| Oct 20 | No Seminar | ||
| Oct 27 | Reading session: Explainable AI and counterfactual reasoning | Soroush | Explainable AI and Causal Understanding: Counterfactual Approaches Considered. |
| Nov 3 | Counterfactual Knowledge and Its Limits | Franz | |
| Nov 10 | TBA | ||
| Nov 17 | Awareness Logic | Soroush | Ch. 3 of Handbook of Epistemic Logic |
| Nov 24 | TBA | Ethan | |
| Dec 1 | Evidential Decision Theory | Soroush | |
| Dec 8 | Jamesian Goalkeeping | Matthew Vermaire | |
| Dec 15 | TBA | Petronella | |
| Dec 22 | TBA | Elias Yuan | |
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