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 2026-27, Mondays 3-5 in Edgecliffe G03
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Oct 5
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Franz Berto: On the Epistemic Value of Imagination |
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Oct 12
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Alice Murphy: Scientific Imagination |
| Oct 19 |
No seminar (Independent Learning Week) |
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Oct 26
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Rory: Alicia Steinmetz ‘Why the Imaginary Needs the Imagination’ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/732252 |
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Nov 2
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Ethan Lai: Personal Possibilities |
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Nov 9
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TBD |
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Nov 16
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Petronella & Soroush: Varieties of Risk, Made Precise |
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Nov 23
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Guilherme Cardoso |
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Nov 30
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WIKI Double Bill: Hannes Leitgeb and Richard Pettigrew |
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Dec 7
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TBD |
| Dec 14 |
TBD |
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Dec 21 (Vacation Dec. 22)
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No seminar |
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