A lot of philosophers are pessimistic about conceivability evidence. They think it doesn't prove, or even go very far towards justifying, interesting modal conclusions. A number of other philosophers are optimistic; they think it does justify, and perhaps even establish beyond a reasonable doubt, that lots of interesting things are possible. Nothing very surprising there. What is slightly surpr...

A sophisticated version of the zombie argument due to David Chalmers runs roughly as follows: a world is ideally primarily conceivable, and whatever conceivable possible. Thus, possible, which implies, in turn, that either physicalism false or Russellian monism true. Appealing some plausible mereological considerations, Daniel Giberman presents novel effect zombies are not conceivable. I shall ...

1.1 Conceivability and PossibilityDavid Chalmers’ challenge to physicalism has dominated the philosophy of mind for the last seventeen years. His 1995paper ‘Facing up to the Problem of Consciousness’ and his 1996 book The Conscious Mind reinvigorated the debate between physicalists and dualists. But Chalmers’ mature attack on physicalism appeared over a decade later in his extensive 2009 paper ...

This paper discusses the role of existence presuppositions and conceivability in linguistic interpretation. In particular, it is discussed evidence that the non-emptiness requirement on universally-quantified propositions might be satisfied through access to a background of knowledge concerning what might be the case in the actual world, as opposed to a background of knowledge concerning what i...

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...

A number of popular arguments for dualism start from a premise about an epistemic gap between physical truths about truths about consciousness, and infer an ontological gap between physical processes and consciousness. Arguments of this sort include the conceivability argument, the knowledge argument, the explanatory-gap argument, and the property dualism argument. Such arguments are often resi...