Imaginings play a crucial role in accounting for fictionality, but what are they? Focusing on those invited by fictions, this chapter argues for the deflationary view that imaginings are just entertainings, I=E. This view was standard in early analytic philosophy, but few current writers appear to hold it. The chapter critically addresses an argument by Walton against I=E that may contribute to explaining this turn; some who espouse views that are otherwise close to I=E endorse this argument against it. In response to Walton’s argument, the chapter invokes a point suggested by Walton himself: Many imaginings – i.e., entertainings, on the view defended here – are mental episodes that agents launch for a purpose. The chapter also appeals to this fact to dispose of a miscellany of other contemporary considerations against I=E. In addition to answering objections, the chapter offers a positive consideration in favor of I=E: to wit, that it may help to establish the imagination as a fundamental, irreducible mental attitude – a view that many philosophers do endorse.

Many scholars argue that Ockham is ontologically committed to non-present temporalia. Often, that claim is defended by an appeal to Ockham’s account of the truth conditions for tensed propositions, which these scholars argue entails that a true tensed proposition presupposes non-present temporalia. I argue, however, that the truth conditions that Ockham provides for tensed propositions entail no such thing. For, according to the account that Ockham provides, a tensed proposition is true just in case some equivalent present-tense proposition was (will be) true. A present-tense proposition is ontologically committing only when it is true, however, and, at those times at which it is true, the things it presupposes are presently existing things, not non-present temporalia. Consequently, the claim that Ockham is committed to non-present temporalia cannot be defended by appeal to his account of the truth conditions for tensed propositions.

This chapter gives a critical exposition of Ockham’s innovations in the theory of the assertoric syllogism: his extensions of the class of syllogistic propositions to include singular propositions, propositions with a quantified predicate, tensed propositions and propositions in grammatical cases other than the nominative; his rules for the conversion of these propositions and for syllogisms containing them; his un-Aristotelian style of reducing syllogisms to the first figure by inference-to-inference transformations; and above all his use of supposition theory as a semantic base for this expanded syllogistic theory. His broadening of the scope of syllogistic theory resulted in abandoning several Aristotelian rules of the syllogism; it also resulted in a toleration of inferences containing redundant premises. The chapter provides proof-theoretic justifications for certain inferences that Ockham merely declared to be valid. It also argues that the originality of certain aspects of Ockham’s logic results from his philosophical nominalism.