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762Impossible WorldsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2013). 2013.It is a venerable slogan due to David Hume, and inherited by the empiricist tradition, that the impossible cannot be believed, or even conceived. In Positivismus und Realismus, Moritz Schlick claimed that, while the merely practically impossible is still conceivable, the logically impossible, such as an explicit inconsistency, is simply unthinkable. An opposite philosophical tradition, however, maintains that inconsistencies and logical impossibilities are thinkable, and sometimes believable, to…Read more
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675Conceivability and possibility: some dilemmas for HumeansSynthese 195 (6): 2697-2715. 2018.The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental r…Read more
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4278Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary GuideBloomsbury Academic. 2015.'Ontology and Metaontology: A Contemporary Guide' is a clear and accessible survey of ontology, focussing on the most recent trends in the discipline. Divided into parts, the first half characterizes metaontology: the discourse on the methodology of ontological inquiry, covering the main concepts, tools, and methods of the discipline, exploring the notions of being and existence, ontological commitment, paraphrase strategies, fictionalist strategies, and other metaontological questions. The sec…Read more
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65Wittgenstein on Incompleteness Makes Paraconsistent SenseIn Francesco Berto, Edwin Mares, Koji Tanaka & Francesco Paoli (eds.), Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications, Springer. pp. 257--276. 2008.I provide an interpretation of Wittgenstein's much criticized remarks on Gödel's First Incompleteness Theorem in the light of paraconsistent arithmetics: in taking Gödel's proof as a paradoxical derivation, Wittgenstein was right, given his deliberate rejection of the standard distinction between theory and metatheory. The reasoning behind the proof of the truth of the Gödel sentence is then performed within the formal system itself, which turns out to be inconsistent. I show that the models of …Read more
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1702Modal meinongianism and fiction: The best of three worldsPhilosophical Studies 152 (3): 313-35. 2011.We outline a neo-Meinongian framework labeled as Modal Meinongian Metaphysics (MMM) to account for the ontology and semantics of fictional discourse. Several competing accounts of fictional objects are originated by the fact that our talking of them mirrors incoherent intuitions: mainstream theories of fiction privilege some such intuitions, but are forced to account for others via complicated paraphrases of the relevant sentences. An ideal theory should resort to as few paraphrases as possible.…Read more
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34How to Rule Out Things with Words: Strong Paraconsistency and the Algebra of Exclusion1In Greg Restall & Gillian Kay Russell (eds.), New waves in philosophical logic, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 169. 2012.
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1182A 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
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3198Hegel's dialectics as a semantic theory: An analytic readingEuropean Journal of Philosophy 15 (1). 2007.
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465There’s Plenty of Boole at the Bottom: A Reversible CA Against Information EntropyMinds 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
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728On Conceiving the InconsistentProceedings 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
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1535Impossible worlds and propositions: Against the parity thesisPhilosophical 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
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868Coincident Entities and Question-Begging Predicates: an Issue in Meta-OntologyMetaphysica 14 (1): 1-15. 2013.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
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523The Selection ProblemRevue 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
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681To exist and to count: A note on the minimalist viewDialectica 63 (3): 343-356. 2009.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
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270Meaning, Metaphysics, and ContradictionAmerican Philosophical Quarterly 43 (4): 283-297. 2006.None
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203How to Sell a Contradiction: The Logic and Metaphysics of InconsistencyCollege Publications. 2007.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
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25Buone scartoffie, cattive intenzioni: una piccola nota su DocumentalitàRivista di Estetica 50 29-35. 2012.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
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1121Modal Meinongianism and CharacterizationGrazer 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.
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158There's Something About Gdel: The Complete Guide to the Incompleteness TheoremWiley-Blackwell. 2009.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
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2034Paraconsistency: Logic and Applications (edited book)Springer. 2013.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
St Andrews, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
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Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Formal Epistemology |
Doxastic and Epistemic Logic |
Metaphysics |
Modality |
Metaontology |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |