Counterfactuals versus conceivability as a guide to modal knowledge
نویسندگان
چکیده
منابع مشابه
Conceivability and Modal Knowledge
in a broader context of arguing against the view that conceivability provides epistemic access to the metaphysical modalities. His goal is “to identify the sources and forms of our knowledge of metaphysical possibility and metaphysical necessity” (205). 1 The account proceeds in two stages. First, he contends that “metaphysical necessity and metaphysical possibility can be reductively explained...
متن کاملIs Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?
Doubts about a maxim like Hume’s have a variety of historical sources. Some date back as far as Descartes’s claim that, since he can conceive himself in a purely mental condition, his essence is only to think. “How does it follow,” Arnauld asks, “from the fact that he is aware of nothing else belonging to his essence, that nothing else does in fact belong to it?” Others are as recent as the dis...
متن کاملCounterfactuals and Modal Epistemology
What is our epistemic access to metaphysical modality? Timothy Williamson suggests that the epistemology of counterfactuals will provide the answer. Th is paper challenges Williamson’s account and argues that certain elements of the epistemology of counterfactuals that he discusses, namely so called background knowledge and constitutive facts, are already saturated with modal content which his ...
متن کاملFROM CONCEIVABILITY TO POSSIBILITY An Essay in Modal Epistemology
This study deals with the thesis that conceivability implies possibility. Confronted with alleged counterexamples to this thesis, some philosophers have turned to what may be called “idealized” or “more demanding” notions of conceivability. I argue that in turning to such notions, they have made the thesis useless to limited beings like us for attaining modal knowledge. However, in refusing to ...
متن کاملPhilosophical Knowledge and Knowledge of Counterfactuals
Metaphysical modalities are definable from counterfactual conditionals, and the epistemology of the former is a special case of the epistemology of the latter. In particular, the role of conceivability and inconceivability in assessing claims of possibility and impossibility can be explained as a special case of the pervasive role of the imagination in assessing counterfactual conditionals, an ...
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ژورنال
عنوان ژورنال: Philosophical Studies
سال: 2019
ISSN: 0031-8116,1573-0883
DOI: 10.1007/s11098-019-01386-x