2025-2028 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 , 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
Student Assistant: Krisztian Kos
WIKI Steering Committee
Dr. (EHESS, Jean Nicod)
Prof. (Claremont McKenna)
Prof. (CUNY)
WIKI outputs
- L. Hornischer & F. Berto, ‘The Logic of Dynamical Systems is Relevant’, Mind 2025, .
- F. Berto, ‘Saying the Same Thing’,Erkenntnis 2025, .
- F. Berto, ‘Impossible Worlds Are Here to Stay’, íپ, 2026, .
- F. Berto & S. Rafiee Rad, ‘Dynamics of Counterfactual Supposition I: the Qualitative Case’, Review of Symbolic Logic, 2026, .
- F. Berto, ‘The Ramsey Test for Counterfactuals Is a Consistent ‘Heuristic”, Ergo, 2026, .
- P Randell ‘On catastrophising: What’s so bad about imagining the worst?’ The Junkyard, .
- F. Berto & G. Restall, ‘Reasoning with Negations: the Australian Plan, Negation-As-Failure, and Card Selection Tasks’,Review of Philosophy and Psychology, 2026, .
- 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, 2026, .
- F. Berto & A. Özgün, ‘The Method of Thought Experiments: Probability and Counterfactuals’, Journal of Philosophy, forthcoming 2026, .
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 |
Alice Murphy: Scientific Imagination |
| Oct 19 |
No seminar (Independent Learning Week) |
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Oct 26 |
Soroush Rafiee Rad: The Causal-Explanatory Counterfactual |
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Nov 2 |
Ethan Lai: Knowledge Relative to Competence |
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Nov 9 |
Rory: Alicia Steinmetz ‘Why the Imaginary Needs the Imagination’ |
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Nov 16 |
Petronella & Soroush: Varieties of Risk, Made Precise |
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Nov 23 |
Vita Kudryavtseva ‘The Very Best Choice: Savage Acts, Option Unawareness, and What Deliberation is Good for’ |
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Nov 30 |
WIKI Double Bill: Hannes Leitgeb ‘On the Difference Semantics for Conditionals’ and Richard Pettigrew ‘Imaging, accuracy, imagining, and random walks’ |
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Dec 7 |
Piotr Kozak ‘The Return of the Striped Tiger: Perceptualism vs. Pictoralism’ |
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Dec 14 |
Amiya Hashkes ‘Fallibilism and Imagination’ |
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Dec 21 (Vacation Dec. 22)
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No seminar |
WIKI Seminar 2025-26 Semester 2
| 13/04 | Draft paper: Imaging Maximizes Expected Modal Epistemic Utility
Presenters: Franz & Soroush |
| 20/04 | Williamson,
Presenter: Petronella |
| 27/04
[27/04-10/05 Revision weeks] |
Group reading: Chris Badura,
Presenter: Franz |
| 4/05:
[6th May, 9am-5pm: Imagination day] |
Bank Holiday |
| 11/05 | No Seminar (Franz in Uppsala) |
| 18/05 | Myers,
Presenter: Matthew Vermaire |
| 25/05 | Bank Holiday |
| 1/06 | No Seminar (Arche Reading Party) |
| 8/06 | Levy & Kinberg,
Presenter: Alice Murphy |
| 15/06 | Munro,
Presenter: Matthew Vermaire |
| 22/06 | On catastrophising: What’s so bad about imagining the worst?
Presenter: Petronella |
| 29/06 | No Seminar (Graduation Week) |
| 06/07 | Discussion of Schwartz, “Political imagination and its limits”
Presenter: Rory Kent |
| 13/07 | 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