•  1212
    Aboutness in Imagination
    Philosophical Studies 175 (8): 1871-1886. 2018.
    I present a formal theory of the logic and aboutness of imagination. Aboutness is understood as the relation between meaningful items and what they concern, as per Yablo and Fine’s works on the notion. Imagination is understood as per Chalmers’ positive conceivability: the intentional state of a subject who conceives that p by imagining a situation—a configuration of objects and properties—verifying p. So far aboutness theory has been developed mainly for linguistic representation, but it is nat…Read more
  •  33
    Modal Meinongianism and Actuality
    Humana Mente 6 (25). 2013.
    Modal Meinongianism is the most recent neo-Meinongian theory. Its main innovation consists in a Comprehension Principle which, unlike other neo-Meinongian approaches, seemingly avoids limitations on the properties that can characterize objects. However, in a recent paper A. Sauchelli has raised an objection against modal Meinongianism, to the effect that properties and relations involving reference to worlds at which they are instantiated, and specifically to the actual world or parts thereof, f…Read more
  •  29
    Un'interpretazione analitica della dialettica hegeliana
    Iride: Filosofia e Discussione Pubblica 17 (3): 569-592. 2004.
  • Quale barba per il rasoio di ockham?: Problemi del riduzionismo metafisico
    with Enrico Bellinelli
    Divus Thomas 110 (2): 9-28. 2007.
  • Dialettica come semantica
    Epistemologia 26 (1): 5-44. 2003.
  •  14
    Modus Tollerns. Kant, Hegel e la critica della nozione logica di sostanza
    Giornale di Metafisica 25 (2): 287-304. 2003.
  •  625
    Williamson on Counterpossibles
    Journal of Philosophical Logic 47 (4): 693-713. 2018.
    A counterpossible conditional is a counterfactual with an impossible antecedent. Common sense delivers the view that some such conditionals are true, and some are false. In recent publications, Timothy Williamson has defended the view that all are true. In this paper we defend the common sense view against Williamson’s objections.
  •  1140
    A Modality Called ‘Negation’
    Mind 124 (495): 761-793. 2015.
    I propose a comprehensive account of negation as a modal operator, vindicating a moderate logical pluralism. Negation is taken as a quantifier on worlds, restricted by an accessibility relation encoding the basic concept of compatibility. This latter captures the core meaning of the operator. While some candidate negations are then ruled out as violating plausible constraints on compatibility, different specifications of the notion of world support different logical conducts for negations. The a…Read more
  •  3114
  •  432
    There’s Plenty of Boole at the Bottom: A Reversible CA Against Information Entropy
    with Jacopo Tagliabue and Gabriele Rossi
    Minds and Machines 26 (4): 341-357. 2016.
    “There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom”, said the title of Richard Feynman’s 1959 seminal conference at the California Institute of Technology. Fifty years on, nanotechnologies have led computer scientists to pay close attention to the links between physical reality and information processing. Not all the physical requirements of optimal computation are captured by traditional models—one still largely missing is reversibility. The dynamic laws of physics are reversible at microphysical level, dis…Read more
  •  696
    On Conceiving the Inconsistent
    Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 114 (1pt1): 103-121. 2014.
    I present an approach to our conceiving absolute impossibilities—things which obtain at no possible world—in terms of ceteris paribus intentional operators: variably restricted quantifiers on possible and impossible worlds based on world similarity. The explicit content of a representation plays a role similar in some respects to the one of a ceteris paribus conditional antecedent. I discuss how such operators invalidate logical closure for conceivability, and how similarity works when impossibl…Read more
  •  1489
    Impossible worlds and propositions: Against the parity thesis
    Philosophical Quarterly 60 (240): 471-486. 2010.
    Accounts of propositions as sets of possible worlds have been criticized for conflating distinct impossible propositions. In response to this problem, some have proposed to introduce impossible worlds to represent distinct impossibilities, endorsing the thesis that impossible worlds must be of the same kind; this has been called the parity thesis. I show that this thesis faces problems, and propose a hybrid account which rejects it: possible worlds are taken as concrete Lewisian worlds, and impo…Read more
  •  842
    Meta-ontology (in van Inwagen's sense) concerns the methodology of ontology, and a controversial meta-ontological issue is to what extent ontology can rely on linguistic analysis while establishing the furniture of the world. This paper discusses an argument advanced by some ontologists (I call them unifiers) against supporters of or coincident entities (I call them multipliers) and its meta-ontological import. Multipliers resort to Leibniz's Law to establish that spatiotemporally coincident ent…Read more
  •  503
    The Selection Problem
    Revue Internationale de Philosophie 262 (4): 519-537. 2012.
    In 'Fiction and Fictionalism', Mark Sainsbury has recently dubbed “Selection Problem” a serious trouble for Meinongian object theories. Typically, Meinongianism has been phrased as a kind of realism on nonexistent objects : these are mind-independent things, not mental simulacra, having the properties they have independently from the activity of any cognitive agent. But how can one single out an object we have no causal acquaintance with, and which is devoid of spatiotemporal location, picking i…Read more
  • L’esistenza Non È Logica
    with Roberto Ciuni
    Rivista di Estetica 45. 2010.
  •  656
    Sometimes mereologists have problems with counting. We often don't want to count the parts of maximally connected objects as full-fledged objects themselves, and we don't want to count discontinuous objects as parts of further, full-fledged objects. But whatever one takes "full-fledged object" to mean, the axioms and theorems of classical, extensional mereology commit us to the existence both of parts and of wholes – all on a par, included in the domain of quantification – and this makes mereolo…Read more
  •  268
    Meaning, Metaphysics, and Contradiction
    American Philosophical Quarterly 43 (4): 283-297. 2006.
    None
  •  199
    There is a principle in things, about which we cannot be deceived, but must always, on the contrary, recognize the truth – viz. that the same thing cannot at one and the same time be and not be": with these words of the Metaphysics, Aristotle introduced the Law of Non-Contradiction, which was to become the most authoritative principle in the history of Western thought. However, things have recently changed, and nowadays various philosophers, called dialetheists, claim that this Law does not hold…Read more
  •  25
    I take into account Ferraris’ attempt at reversing the traditional order of explanation going from thought to language and writing, as exposed in Documentalità. The reversal is supposed to provide a new ontology of social objects that dispenses with Searle’s notion of (collective) intentionality. The book’s motto is «[social] object = written act». What does that identity sign mean? Given that social objects are not identical with documents taken as mere material objects, they must be identical …Read more
  •  1089
    Modal Meinongianism and Characterization
    Grazer Philosophische Studien 90 (1): 183-200. 2014.
    In this paper we reply to arguments of Kroon (“Characterization and Existence in Modal Meinongianism”. Grazer Philosophische Studien 86, 23–34) to the effect that Modal Meinongianism cannot do justice to Meinongian claims such as that the golden mountain is golden, and that it does not exist.
  •  155
    Berto’s highly readable and lucid guide introduces students and the interested reader to Gödel’s celebrated _Incompleteness Theorem_, and discusses some of the most famous - and infamous - claims arising from Gödel's arguments. Offers a clear understanding of this difficult subject by presenting each of the key steps of the _Theorem_ in separate chapters Discusses interpretations of the _Theorem_ made by celebrated contemporary thinkers Sheds light on the wider extra-mathematical and philosophic…Read more
  •  1956
    A logic is called 'paraconsistent' if it rejects the rule called 'ex contradictione quodlibet', according to which any conclusion follows from inconsistent premises. While logicians have proposed many technically developed paraconsistent logical systems and contemporary philosophers like Graham Priest have advanced the view that some contradictions can be true, and advocated a paraconsistent logic to deal with them, until recent times these systems have been little understood by philosophers. Th…Read more
  •  841
    Impossible Worlds and the Logic of Imagination
    Erkenntnis 82 (6): 1277-1297. 2017.
    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. I propose to capture imagination, so understood, via variably strict world quantifiers, in a modal framework including both possible and so-called impossible worlds. The latter secure lack of classical logical closure for the relevant mental states, while the variability of strictness captures how the agent imp…Read more
  •  52
    Guest editors' introduction
    Logic and Logical Philosophy 19 (1-2): 5-6. 2010.
    A logic is said to be paraconsistent if it doesn’t license you to infer everything from a contradiction. To be precise, let |= be a relation of logical consequence. We call |= explosive if it validates the inference rule: {A,¬A} |= B for every A and B. Classical logic and most other standard logics, including intuitionist logic, are explosive. Instead of licensing you to infer everything from a contradiction, paraconsistent logic allows you to sensibly deal with the contradiction