26 October 2021, The Utrecht Logic in Progress Series (TULIPS), Thomas Ferguson

Abstract: The framework of topic-sensitive intentional modal operators (TSIMs) described by Berto provides a general platform for representing agents' intentional states of various kinds. For example, a TSIM can model doxastic states, capturing a notion that given the acceptance of antecedent information P, an agent will have a consequent belief Q. Notably, the truth conditions for TSIMs include a subject-matter filter so that the topic of the consequent Q must be "included" within that of the antecedent P. In practice, the types of intentional states modeled by TSIMs can be nested within one another--one can have beliefs about beliefs, one can imagine that one knows, etc. The device of the subject-matter filter, however, requires that modeling the semantics of such nested TSIMs requires an adequate account of the subject-matter of sentences in which a TSIM appears. In this talk, I will discuss extending earlier work on the subject-matter of intensional conditionals to the special case of TSIMs and argue that the account provided is adequate both formally and philosophically.