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The necessity of conceivability

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Abstract

In his conceivability argument, Chalmers assumes that all properties have their causal powers contingently and causal laws are also contingent. We argue that this claim conflicts with how conceivability itself must work for the conceivability argument to be successful. If conceivability is to be an effective mechanism to determine possibility, it must work as a matter of necessity, since contingent conceivability renders conceivability fallible for an ideal reasoner and the fallible conceivability of zombies would not entail their possibility. But necessary conceivability must either be governed by necessitating causal processes or by a necessitating non-causal mechanism. We argue that the latter option is untenable or mysterious; whereas, if Chalmers chooses the former and applies it only to conceivability, his solution is ad hoc, but if he accepts necessary causal powers or processes generally, the conceivability argument fails. We conclude that, as it stands, the Conceivability Argument does not establish that physicalism is false.

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Notes

  1. Our focus here is on Chalmers’s conceivability argument because it is the most well developed, with a very large number of philosophers relying on it and accepting its conclusion about consciousness, and it could be considered foundational in current philosophy of mind. Consider panpsychists, who accept the conclusion of the conceivability argument, and so do many others. As such, the tenability of Chalmers’s conclusion is of crucial importance to a wide range of philosophical positions on physicalism and the mind.

  2. The explicit introduction of Russellian Monism into the conceivability argument is made in order to exclude a range of ontological views from the conclusion that physicalism is false, views to which the argument would otherwise not apply. In such views, phenomenal properties are necessarily connected to or identical with physical ones and so the move from the primary possibility of the zombie hypothesis P¬&¬Q to its secondary possibility does not hold. We will further consider this and some other ontological accounts of the world in which the conceivability does not apply in Sect. 4.2.

  3. One might question the notion of ideal rational conceivability in either its positive or negative forms on the grounds that it could not be achieved by any actual agents. We will not consider this objection here.

  4. For a survey of issues concerning conceivability in cognitive psychology, see Berto & Schoonen (2018).

  5. See, for instance: Jackson, 1982; Horgan, 1987; Chalmers, 1996; also Kirk, 1979; Seager, 1991 and Levine, 2001, who reject arguments against materialism because of the epiphenomenalism about qualia they imply. Chalmers (1996, 150–4, 160) allows that there may be a way to understand causation and qualia which avoids epiphenomenalism, although he tends towards accepting and then mitigating it.

  6. The unlikelihood in this case is associated with the fact that the phenomenal properties associated with conceivability would have to have their influence in a non-causal way, and also do so in a subtle enough way that zombies remained conceivable. A zombie—who does not have phenomenal properties—needs to be able to positively conceive of propositions in order to be physically or functionally indistinguishable from a conscious human subject. (See Balog, 1999.) In any case, we consider the options were consciousness to be involved below.

  7. In this regard, when we say that conceivability has a causal mechanism what we mean is this: there is a set of physical properties whose interactions and other physical events bring about the process of conceiving of a certain proposition for an agent, where this ‘bringing about’ is to be initially understood in Chalmers’s own causal terms, i.e. contingently. The details of the causal account are not important here however: what is important is that, according to the physicalist, there would be some such physical mechanism and so we leave it open to physicalists to substitute their favoured physicalist account of mental processing for our own.

  8. Here, one should not get mixed up between the contingency of the conceivability of S and the contingency of S. There is no problem with ¬S being ideally conceivable and thereby possible in all the same situations in which S is conceivable (and that would be expected for a contingent S).

  9. It is notable that another modal notion has crept into the account of conceivability here via the characterisation of ideal reasoning, and it is far from clear that Chalmers can explain this away in terms of its being an epistemic or cognitive modality as he attempted to do in the quote above without making the account of ideal reasoning vacuous. We will not pursue this matter here, however.

  10. We are not interested here in whether these thinkers are correct to reason as they do about the zombie hypothesis; they are free to challenge Chalmers on the soundness of his argument. Rather, we are aiming to show that these cases are not genuine cases in which a proposition (in this case about zombies) is contingently ideally conceivable.

  11. One might take issue with Chalmers’s reliance on the notion of conclusive a priori reasoning here, but we will assume that (perhaps by definition) ideal rational reflection involves such reasoning (and that ideal reasoners can tell when their a priori reasoning is less than conclusive). As noted, there are difficulties associated with ideal rational reflection and ideal reasoners too but, since these problems would serve to strengthen objections to the conceivability argument rather than weaken them, it does Chalmers no injustice to ignore them here.

  12. Leuenberger (2015) has recently argued for this kind of modal system and that Chalmers should be committed to such a system.

  13. Chalmers’s account has already ruled out the presence of such properties which affect reasoning directly (and thereby defeat it) in his account of ideal reasoning, but we must rule out other properties which might interfere with Bella’s conceiving.

  14. It is worth noting here that we are not claiming that one needs to explain the precise underlying causal mechanism for each specific conceivable proposition in order to legitimise it as conceivable. Rather, we are concerned that there needs to be some mechanism or other which makes it the case that the range of conceivable propositions can be conceived by ideal rational agents in their respective possible worlds. Furthermore, for the conceivability argument to affect physicalism—as it aims to do—these mechanisms will need to be physicalistically respectable ones in physically possible worlds. The precise mechanisms involved in each case will be subject to local variations, depending upon the world and species of conceiver, but the details are not important (although they may be of interest to psychology or neuroscience). What we have to say targets Chalmers’ conceivability argument but does not lead to scepticism about the possibility of conceiving a wide range of propositions, nor to generalised scepticism about modal knowledge.

  15. On the question of the implications of powers theories on the conceivability argument, see Allen Forthcoming; Aranyosi, 2010; Carruth, 2016. Moreover, Chalmers himself considers that strong necessities, or necessary laws of nature, would undermine the conceivability were they to be plausible (2010, 167-70). Compare Cumpa’s (2018, 170-171) discussion of the implications of necessary and contingent causal roles of properties on Chalmers’s view of the strong emergence of consciousness.

  16. As Allen (Forthcoming) notes, the way in which the conceivability argument would be blocked depends upon one’s other commitments, including whether or not one is committed to actualism and whether one accepts an ontology of pure causal powers or powerful qualities.

  17. Because of the explicit mention of Russellian Monism in the conceivability argument it is not accurate to say that the argument does not apply to it. However, it is treated as an exception to other physicalist views in that the argument does not show it to be false. The same will apply to powerful quality theories if these are considered to be versions of Russellian Monism.

  18. In keeping with our presumption for the sake of the argument, we will ignore Allen’s (Forthcoming) counterarguments to this account.

  19. We should note that we are not concerned with conceivability in general, but only with Chalmers’s account in his argument. Thus, our claim in this connection is, as we will argue below, that if there is no causal mechanism underlying conceivability, Chalmers is demanding that physicalists accept and use a non-physicalist account of conceivability.

  20. See, for instance: Kim, 1993; Shapiro, 2004; Walter, 2010; Bennett, 2011; Baysan, 2015.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on a previous version of this paper. This publication has been made possible thanks to financial support provided by the Research Talent Attraction Program (Project ID: 2016-T1/HUM-1263) from Consejería de Educación, Universidades, Ciencia y Portavocía de la Comunidad de Madrid.

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Project ID of Javier Cumpa (Grant Recipient): 2016-T1/HUM-1263

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Allen, S.R., Cumpa, J. The necessity of conceivability. Synthese 200, 140 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03534-z

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