Abstract
This paper defends a rational account of conceivability according to which conceiving is a kind of modal thinking that is distinct from imagining effectively allowing us to think beyond what we can imagine, and that we are subject to rational rather than experiential constraints when we do so. Defending this view involves appealing to the perspective of an idealized agent and I’ll argue that this appeal is not worrisome given an “objective” view of propositional justification.
Notes
Jackson (2016, p. 43) provides a taxonomy of the cognitive processes underlying modal thinking, persuasively arguing for “a systematic picture of imaginings, supposings and conceivings as the products of three distinctive cognitive capacities”. The first and third of these are especially relevant to modal thinking in philosophical theorizing, though Jackson is skeptical about the epistemic value of conceiving.
The view of conceivability defended here is roughly consistent with the notion of “ideal conceivability” defended in Chalmers (2002, pp. 147–149).
Jackson (2018) also provides a more “speculative” defense of the claim that imagination is instructive not only because it tells us about the structural features of subjective experience but also because there is a way of going from claims about how things must look to claims about how things must be. I will leave this more speculative defense aside here because I do not think that any defense beyond the one given above is needed for present purposes.
Marcus (2004) correctly argues that zombies are unimaginable, however, he wrongly uses imagining and conceiving interchangeably. Similarly, see Dennett (1995, p. 322) “when philosophers claim that zombies are conceivable, they invariably under-estimate the task of conception (or imagination) and end up imagining something that violates their own definition”.
This argument is developed in Marcus (2004).
Similarly, conceiving of the Chinese nation case does not require that we take up the perspective of the Chinese Nation and conceiving of the Swampman case does not require that we take up the perspective of Swampman.
A further question here is whether the thesis that conceivability entails possibility can survive the move to a paraconsistent logic. If we can conceive of inconsistent objects, does that mean that they are metaphysically possible? Berto (2014, 104) jettisons the entailment from conceivability to possibility in the case of inconsistent objects, while Da Costa (1999, p. 32) argues that a paraconsistent logician should remain “agnostic” about the existence of inconsistent objects. On the other hand, a paraconsistent logician could retain the entailment between conceivability and possibility by arguing for a dialetheic view according to which inconsistent objects exist, see Priest (2006).
Jackson is skeptical: “Is conceiving, so understood, a cognitive capacity that we actually have? … In general, I am skeptical about whether we can occupy cognitive perspectives of subjects whose mental capacities are so radically different from our own, or even just approximate these perspectives well enough” (2016, p. 57).
This type of propositional justification is discussed and defended in Ichikawa and Jarvis (2013, p. 163).
There may be other constraints as well. For example, Chalmers (2012) discusses completeness of the description as an additional constraint on considering possible cases.
See Kind and Kung (2016, p. 21) for further discussion.
For further discussion see Brandom (2007, pp. 660–662).
This is not to deny that other approaches to breaking stalemates, such as diagnosing verbal disputes, are sometimes appropriate.
Chalmers (2002, p. 150) writes:
One can place the varieties of positive conceivability under the broad rubric of imagination: to positively conceive of a situation is to in some sense imagine a specific configuration of objects and properties.
Positive conceivability, the kind of conceivability that Chalmers holds to be most relevant to philosophical theorizing is held to be a form of imagination. I do not agree that conceivability can be placed under the broad rubric of imagination. Does it follow that we can’t positively conceive of zombies and the like? The type of conceiving that I have been arguing for here might seem more similar to what Chalmers (2002, p. 149) has called negative conceivability than positive conceivability. This is not the place to enter into a discussion of why negative conceivability is or is not sufficient for understanding the type of conceivability at issue in philosophical theorizing. Still, if something more is required than idealized negative conceivability then, the more that is required cannot always be constructed out of past experience.
I would like to thank two anonymous referees for Synthese and the editors of this special edition for comments on this paper. Thanks to Henry Jackman and Claudine Verheggen for discussion of earlier versions of the paper. An early version of the paper was presented at the Canadian Philosophical Association’s annual meeting (2018) and I would like to thank the audience and Nathan Howard for commenting on the paper at that meeting.
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Cumby, J. Thinking beyond Imagining. Synthese 199, 7423–7435 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03121-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03121-8