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Franz Berto, Topics of Thought: The Logic of Knowledge, Belief, Imagination, Oxford University Press, 2022, 229pp., $97.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192857491.
Reviewed by Justin Khoo, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Franz Berto’s Topics of Thought is a wide-ranging and informative read, exploring with thoroughness and technical sophistication the logic of states of thought such as belief, knowledge, supposition, imagination, and so on. Berto’s question is this: in virtue of believing/knowing/supposing that p, what else must one believe/know/suppose, merely in virtue of the logic of thought? Berto and colleagues (several of the chapters are co-authored) argue that these attitudes are topic-sensitive, which means that whether someone bears them towards a proposition depends both on the proposition’s truth-conditions, as well as its topic (or what it is about).
For example, one might believe that 2 + 2 = 4 without believing that water is H2O, even though the two claims are truth-conditionally equivalent, since they are about…
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