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 ...

In this paper I argue that certain so-called conceivability arguments fail to show that a currently popular version of physicalism in the philosophy of mind is false. Concentrating on an argument due to David Chalmers, I first argue that Chalmers misrepresents the relation between conceivability and possibility. I then argue that the intuition behind the conceivability of so-called zombie world...

David Chalmers’ conceivability argument against physicalism relies on the entailment from a priori conceivability to metaphysical possibility. The a posteriori physicalist rejects this premise, but is consequently committed to psychophysical strong necessities. These don’t fit into the Kripkean model of the necessary a posteriori, and they are therefore, according to Chalmers, problematic. But ...

Kripke (1980) famously separates the metaphysical and epistemic modal domains, with supposed necessary a posteriori identity statements such as ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’, appearing to create an irreconcilable gap between conceivability and possibility. In response to this problem, David Chalmers (2002, 2004a, 2006) uses two-dimensional modal semantics (2DS) to claim that conceivability entails p...

Type-physicalism is the view that sensory states and properties are identical with their nomologically correlated brain states and properties. The main challenge to this view is how to overcome conceivability arguments such as the conceivability of disembodiment or of zombiehood. In this paper, I explain how I think the type-physicalist should respond to such arguments. More specifically, I wan...

The claim that zombies are conceivable is a premise of one of the most important anti-physicalist arguments. Eric Marcus (2004) challenges that premise in two novel ways. He observes that conceiving of zombies would require imagining total subjective absence. And this, he argues, we cannot do. However, his argument turns on the assumption that absence is imaginable only against a background of ...

The conclusion of this argument (hereafter ZA) entails the falsity of physicalism because, technical details aside, physicalism is or entails the thesis that every psychological truth is entailed by some physical truth. If it is possible that I have a zombie duplicate however, then it is possible that the physical truths are as they are and some psychological truth is different. Hence 3 entails...

There is a long tradition in philosophy of using a priori methods to draw conclusions about what is possible and what is necessary, and often in turn to draw conclusions about matters of substantive metaphysics. Arguments like this typically have three steps: first an epistemic claim (about what can be known or conceived), from there to a modal claim (about what is possible or necessary), and f...

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...

It is widely believed that platonists face a formidable problem: that of providing an intelligible account of mathematical knowledge. The problem is that we seem unable, if the platonist is right, to have the causal relationships with the objects of mathematics without which knowledge of these objects seems unintelligible. The standard platonist response to this challenge is either to deny that...