The Joint Russian-Brazilian Colloquium “Inferential Knowledge about Fictions: How We Infer, and How Far These Inferences Go”
On January 20, 2026, the IL LLFP, in collaboration with the Department of Philosophy of the Ural Institute for the Humanities at the Ural Federal University named after the first President of Russia B. N. Yeltsin and the Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science at the University of Campinas, held the Russian-Brazilian Colloquium “Inferential Knowledge about Fictions: How We Infer, and How Far These Inferences Go.”
The Colloquium participants included ten scholars specializing in the semantics and logic of fictional contexts, featuring both Russian and international guests. The plenary speaker was Franz Berto from the University of St Andrews, who delivered an online presentation titled “Imaging and Imagining.” Professor Berto discussed the commonalities between imagination and conditional statements, how to apply probabilistic logic to model imaginary scenarios, and why this model withstands the Ramsey test. A discussion followed the presentation. Questions were posed by Elena Dragalina-Chernaya, Vitaly Dolgorukov, and Anna Moiseeva (IL LLFP), as well as by Evgeny Borisov (IFaL SB RAS).
Representing the Laboratory at the Colloquium were Anna Moiseeva, a research fellow at IL LLFP, and Ramazan Ayupov, a research assistant at the Laboratory and a student at the HSE School of Philosophy and Cultural Studies. Anna Moiseeva made a presentation titled “Fiction as a Believable Possible World,” in which she proposed introducing the modality of the believable possible within the semantics of fictional contexts, defined this modality, and illustrated her idea with an example. She then reviewed existing approaches in the literature suitable for modeling such a modality and outlined the aspects in which these approaches need further development to meet this task.
Ramazan Ayupov delivered a presentation titled “Recursive Narratives and Hybrid Logic.” The speaker first discussed the existing semantic tradition for the semantics of fictional names and then addressed the problem of assigning meaning to sentences occurring within the context of a narrative told by a fictional character of another narrative. The speaker proposed interpreting such embedded narratives using semantics for hybrid logic, which provides tools for referring to a specific world, whether actual or fictional. The presentation developed a complete semantics for such contexts and then used it to interpret several examples.
In addition to Laboratory staff, the Colloquium featured presentations by Daniil Tyskin (HSE – St. Petersburg, ILS RAS) on “The Workings of Counteridentity: Evidence from Russian Corpus Data,” Vitalii Rasskazov (HSE – Moscow, Russia) on “Artifactualist Theory of Fiction: The Problem of Cross-Fictional Identity,” and Natalya Khairullina (Kazan State Power Engineering University, Russia) on “The Reality Principle or the Reality Assumption? Using real-world truths in inferences within fictional discourse.” The Russian session moderators were Olga Kozyreva and Ilya Gushchin, representatives of the Ural Federal University Department of Philosophy.
The Colloquium also included participants Newton Marcos Peron (Federal University of Southern Frontier, Brazil) and Henrique Antunes (Federal University of Bahia, Brazil), who presented “A Four-Valued Logical Framework for Reasoning about Fiction.” The speakers first presented the results of their joint work published in their 2022 paper of the same name and then discussed how they are currently developing their approach.
Representing the Laboratory’s academic partner, Marcelo Esteban Coniglio, head of the Centre for Logic, Epistemology and the History of Science at UNICAMP, participated in the Colloquium. As a co-author of the new research by the two Brazilian presenters, Professor Coniglio provided his commentary on the problem of ambiguous context definition (statement about reality or statement about fiction) in cases where something is said about a set of objects, some of which are real and some fictional. He also touched upon the problem of modal contexts.
After all presentations concluded, a general discussion moderated by Professor Coniglio was held within the framework of the Colloquium. The discussion addressed both questions related to the content of the presentations made and general issues in the semantics and logic of fictional contexts. Questions and comments were provided by Newton Peron, Henrique Antunes, Elena Dragalina-Chernaya, Anna Moiseeva, Olga Kozyreva, and Evgeny Borisov.
