Biennale.no 2026

Points of interest to the forum (but not limited to)

Example of a typology sketch for the show

Philosophical issues

Graham Priest argues that impossible worlds must be treated in the same way as possible worlds, and if we don't accept impossible worlds we can't accept possible worlds either.

Takashi Yagisawa argues: There are other ways of the world than the way the world actually is. Call them possible worlds. And there are other ways of the world than the ways the world could be. Call them impossible worlds.

Extended genuine modal realism accepts concrete possible and impossible worlds. Whatever is impossible holds in some concrete impossible world.

We might wonder whether there is a logic which impossible worlds are closed under. One such candidate is paraconsistent logic(s). Its proponents argue that, impossibly, there are worlds at which inconsistent events happen.

Can we actually think about the impossible? Can we have mental representations - intentional states of the mind - directed to impossible contents? A venerable philosophical tradition denies this. Hume is the most quoted authority: "Tis an establish’d maxim in metaphysics, that whatever the mind clearly conceives includes the idea of possible existence, or in other words, that nothing we imagine is absolutely impossible." This seems to be wrong. Imagination seems to have a logic, albeit one which is hyperintensional and sensitive to context. 'Imagining' is highly ambiguous. We use the word for such different mental activities as daydreaming, hallucinating, supposing, planning, make-believing. Imagination is close to art-making and creativity. We simulate alternatives to reality in our mind, in order to explore what would and would not happen if they were realized.

Hyperintensionality can be characterized as a feature of concepts. An intentional operator X is hyperintensional if when XA and XB have different truth values even when A and B are equivalent. Works on the logic of imagination typically resort to a possible worlds framework, modelling imagination as a restricted quantifier over possible worlds. But imagination, qua intentional mental state, is hyperintensional. Impossible worlds are thus natural candidates for modelling imagination as mental simulation. But imagination, so understood, seems to have further features with which an acceptable model must comply. One feature of imagination as mental simulation is that it can be voluntary in ways belief cannot. One can imagine that all of one's hometown has been painted yellow but, having overwhelming evidence of the contrary, one cannot easily make oneself believe it.

Quine argues that contradictions can be meaningful. Moreover, the doctrine of meaninglessness of contradictions has the severe methodological drawback that it makes it impossible, in principle, ever to devise an effective test of what is meaningful and what is not. It would be forever impossible for us to devise systematic ways of deciding whether a string of signs made sense - even to us individually, let alone other people - or not. For it follows from a discovery in mathematical logic, due to Church, that there can be no generally applicable test of contradictoriness. If we say contradictions are meaningful, aren't we also saying that the impossible is meaningful?

If we say that possible worlds have such-and-such natures, then we seem committed to that claim being necessarily true. After all, if it were possibly false, then it would be false at some possible world, which seems to make little sense.

What difference follows from logical impossibility if Hobbes had (secretly) squared the circle, sick children in the mountains of South America at the time would have cared, or if Hobbes had (secretly) squared the circle, sick children in the mountains of South America at the time would not have cared.

Exactly when did Holmes begin to exist? What to do with 'Mr. Pickwick does not exist' is 'a very complicated question'.

The Strangeness of Impossibility Condition. Thinking in terms of closeness between worlds, the condition says that any possible world is closer to a possible world than any impossible world is. Impossible worlds are kept at a distance for as long as they can be: they’re strange.

Most theists hold not only that God exists, but that God exists of necessity: he couldn't have failed to exist.

Impossible worlds are not worlds which themselves could not exist. Rather, they are worlds which represent impossible states of affairs as obtaining.

Impossible worlds are worlds according to which impossible things happen. If a world represents that such-and-such and it is impossible that such-and-such, then that is an impossible world.

According to Socrates, art merely reproduces empirical reality and is illusory because it does not take us to the (platonic) transcendental World of Ideas, where we can allegedly grasp the essence of all entities. The unnatural is only antimimetic in the sense of Plato because it does not primarily try to imitate or reproduce the world as we know it; rather it involves the representation of scenarios or events that are physically, logically, or humanly impossible.

Sämi Ludwig argues that representations of the impossible (ie. the unnatural) are "digital rather than analogic." That is to say, they offer particular types of information, namely processed information (meaning) rather than mimesis of the outside (imitation).

In the words of Lisa Zunshine, represented impossibilities have a hitherto neglected narrative potential because they open up new conceptual spaces that make possible, and perhaps even necessary, narratives that explore such spaces.

What Keats calls "Negative Capability" can be resorted to as a way of thinking about the attitudes that many unnatural phenomena invite us to adopt: the state of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason.

Biennale.no 2026

Prelude to Impossible Worlds

Introduction

Participation

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List of entries

Card style of the same

Points of interest to the forum (but not limited to)

Example of a typology sketch for the show

Philosophical issues

References

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