Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-12
Author(s):  
Emar Maier ◽  
Andreas Stokke
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Interdisciplinary Work ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Human Capacity

Fiction is the ultimate application of the human capacity for displacement—thinking and talking about things beyond the here and now. Fictional characters may live in very remote possible or even impossible worlds. Yet our engagement with fictional stories and characters seems effortless and permeates every aspect of our everyday lives. How is this possible? How does fictional talk relate to assertions about the here and now, or indeed to modal talk about other possible worlds? What is the relation between fiction and mental states like belief and imagination? How does a sequence of fictional statements become a story? What are fictional characters? How do narrators manage to give us access to their characters’ innermost thoughts and desires? This introductory chapter traces the development of various strands of research on these questions within linguistics, narratology, and philosophy in order to lay a foundation for the cutting-edge interdisciplinary work in this volume.

Rethinking Role Realism

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniela Glavaničová
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
General Idea ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Advantages And Disadvantages ◽  
Individual Concepts ◽  
Gregory Currie ◽  
Fictional Names

Abstract Role realism is a promising realist theory of fictional names. Different versions of this theory have been suggested by Gregory Currie, Peter Lamarque, Stein Haugom Olsen, and Nicholas Wolterstorff. The general idea behind the approach is that fictional characters are to be analysed in terms of roles, which in turn can be understood as sets of properties (or alternatively as kinds or functions from possible worlds to individuals). I will discuss several advantages and disadvantages of this approach. I will then propose a novel hyperintensional version of role realism (which I will call impossibilism), according to which fictional names are analysed in terms of individual concepts that cannot be matched by a reference (a full-blooded individual). I will argue that this account avoids the main disadvantages of standard role realism.

Constructing the Impossible

2021 ◽  
pp. 141-163
Author(s):  
Kit Fine
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Formal Languages ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Limited Role ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Degree Of Acceptance ◽  
Broad Role ◽  
Natural Way

Please keep the original abstract. A number of philosophers have flirted with the idea of impossible worlds and some have even become enamored of it. But it has not met with the same degree of acceptance as the more familiar idea of a possible world. Whereas possible worlds have played a broad role in specifying the semantics for natural language and for a wide range of formal languages, impossible worlds have had a much more limited role; and there has not even been general agreement as to how a reasonable theory of impossible worlds is to be developed or applied. This chapter provides a natural way of introducing impossible states into the framework of truthmaker semantics and shows how their introduction permits a number of useful applications.

scholarly journals QUANTIFIED LOGIC OF AWARENESS AND IMPOSSIBLE POSSIBLE WORLDS

2008 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 514-529 ◽  
Author(s):  
GIACOMO SILLARI
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Explicit Knowledge ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Kripke Semantics ◽  
Logical Omniscience ◽  
Neighborhood Semantics ◽  
Two Systems ◽  
The Many ◽  
Implicit And Explicit

Among the many possible approaches to dealing with logical omniscience, I consider here awareness and impossible worlds structures. The former approach, pioneered by Fagin and Halpern, distinguishes between implicit and explicit knowledge, and avoids logical omniscience with respect to explicit knowledge. The latter, developed by Rantala and by Hintikka, allows for the existence of logically impossible worlds to which the agents are taken to have “epistemological” access; since such worlds need not behave consistently, the agents’ knowledge is fallible relative to logical omniscience. The two approaches are known to be equally expressive in propositional systems interpreted over Kripke semantics. In this paper I show that the two approaches are equally expressive in propositional systems interpreted over Montague-Scott (neighborhood) semantics. Furthermore, I provide predicate systems of both awareness and impossible worlds structures interpreted on neighborhood semantics and prove the two systems to be equally expressive.

scholarly journals The best possible option of impossible worlds: Hybrid Modal Realism

KÜLÖNBSÉG ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamás Ádám Tuboly
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Modal Realism

In this paper I reconstruct the merits and drawbacks of the concretist and abstractionist theories of possible worlds and face them with the challenge of impossible worlds. I show how these two types of theories deal with the problem of impossibilities, and argue that the best option is two advance the so-called hybrid modal realism, namely concret possible worlds and abstract impossible worlds. Finally, as a conclusion, I highlight some of the disadvantages of this view as well and note the possibility of a Carnap-like solution.

Impossible Worlds

Philosophy ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ira Kiourti
Keyword(s):  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Impossible World ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Accessibility Relation ◽  
Possible World Semantics ◽  
Potential Applicability ◽  
Controversial Topic ◽  
Truth Value ◽  
Modern Work

Impossible worlds constitute an increasingly popular yet controversial topic in logic and metaphysics. The term “impossible worlds” parallels the term “possible worlds” and commonly refers to setups, situations, or totalities (“worlds”) that are inconsistent, incomplete, non-classical, or non-normal in possible-world semantics and metaphysics. These may verify a proposition and its negation, be silent as to the truth value of a proposition, or somehow fail to conform to the (classical) laws of logic. Some authors object to the term “impossible world,” preferring to talk of nonstandard worlds or partial situations instead. While the term “impossible world” is sometimes used to refer to a world that is inaccessible from another relative to some specified accessibility relation, impossible worlds are often conceived of as absolutely impossible in a broadly logical, conceptual, or metaphysical sense. As in the case of possible worlds, modern talk of impossible worlds originates with semantic interpretations of modal and non-classical logics, yet the potential applicability of these worlds to logical, metaphysical, and semantic philosophical puzzles has allowed them to permeate the wider philosophical arena. Arguments for impossible worlds often parallel those for possible worlds (see From Possible Worlds to Impossible Worlds) and focus largely on the proposed applications for such worlds (see Applications). As with possible worlds, there are various metaphysical conceptions of impossible worlds (see the Metaphysics of Impossible Worlds), and objections to such worlds are often theory specific (see Objections to Applications and Objections to Impossible Worlds). This article focuses on modern work on impossible worlds and its critics.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tom Adam Davies
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Black Power ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Community Activism ◽  
War On Poverty ◽  
Urban Crisis ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Key Concepts

This introductory chapter briefly captures the major themes covered in this book. It explores three key concepts regarding Black Power: how the ideas, tactics, and language readily associated with Black Power permeated the community activism, and everyday lives, of ordinary African Americans at the local level; how and why mainstream politicians and institutions exploited Black Power's flexibility as an ideology and organizing tool in their efforts to guide the course of black advancement; and the subsequent impact and meaning of those efforts. The chapter examines how public policies intended to engage, modify, and sublimate the Black Power impulse evolved as a response not only to the deepening urban crisis and growing black radicalism but also to the Johnson administration's troubled War on Poverty.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-10
Author(s):  
Zachary Michael Jack
Keyword(s):  
Death And Dying ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Beating Heart ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Cautionary Tale ◽  
Middle America ◽  
Heart Section

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the portrayals of Middle America. How can such a beating-heart section of the country, the very cradle of regionalism, psychically ground and spiritually anchor a nation while simultaneously serving as its ultimate cautionary tale? Those who chose to leave Middle America sometimes hear in its portrayals a chilling message: Middle America is a place to avoid getting stuck in, a place whose fatalistic machinations the monied and mobile do well to escape. Many regionalists present Middle Americans as a Gothic people, from cradle to grave as mindful of death and dying as of living and thriving. Their stories and canvases illuminate an almost funereal-life-art practiced with fidelity in the heartland, where fictional characters and real-life citizens alike undertake the difficult task of living passionately and purposefully against a backdrop of finite and sometimes tragic limits. For true regionalists, however, the homegrown Gothic amounts to much more than mere pessimism or fatalism; it is an homage to Death, Life's less heralded twin, an animating force no less instructive and no less worthy of its own pages.

Dietary Assessment of Nutrition Status of an Individual on the basis of Weekly Intake

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (11) ◽  
pp. 113-117
Author(s):  
Pearl Ahuja and Seema Kalonia
Keyword(s):  
Neural Networks ◽  
Convolutional Neural Networks ◽  
Dietary Assessment ◽  
Cutting Edge ◽  
Nutrition Status ◽  
Main Function ◽  
Weekly Intake ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Neural Organization ◽  
Food Pictures

Food observing and nourishing examination assumes a main function in wellbeing related issues, it is getting more basic in our everyday lives. In this paper, a methodology has been introduced to group pictures of food utilizing convolutional neural organizations. In contrast to the conventional counterfeit neural organizations, convolutional neural organizations have the capacity of assessing the score work straightforwardly from picture pixels. In this paper, we apply a convolutional neural organization (CNN) to the assignments of distinguishing and perceiving food pictures. As a result of the wide variety of sorts of food, picture acknowledgment of food things is commonly troublesome. In any case, profound learning has been indicated as of late to be an incredible picture acknowledgment strategy, and CNN is a cutting edge way to deal with profound learning. We applied CNN to the undertakings of food identification and acknowledgment through boundary advancement. Highlights learned by profound Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have been perceived to be more hearty and expressive than hand-made ones

scholarly journals Impossible Worlds

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Berto ◽  
Mark Jago
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Mental Simulation ◽  
Impossible Worlds ◽  
Logical Necessity ◽  
Possible World ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
Truth In Fiction ◽  
General Tool ◽  
Open Issues

The latter half of the twentieth century witnessed an ‘intensional revolution’, a great collective effort to analyse notions which are absolutely fundamental to our understanding of the world and of ourselves—from meaning and information to knowledge, belief, causation, essence, supervenience, conditionality, as well as nomological, metaphysical, and logical necessity—in terms of a single concept. This was the concept of a possible world: a way things could have been. Possible worlds found applications in logic, metaphysics, semantics, game theory, information theory, artificial intelligence, and the philosophy of mind and cognition. However, possible worlds analyses have been facing numerous problems. This book traces them all back to hyperintensionality: the need for distinctions more fine-grained than the possible worlds apparatus can easily represent. It then introduces impossible worlds—ways things could not have been—as a general tool for modelling hyperintensional phenomena. The book discusses the metaphysics of impossible worlds and applies them to a range of central topics and open issues in logic, semantics, and philosophy: from the problem of logical omniscience in epistemic logic, to the semantics of non-classical logics, the modelling of imagination and mental simulation, the analysis of information and informative inference, truth in fiction, and counterpossible reasoning.

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