Abstract
The present paper proposes a route to modal claims that allows us to infer to certain possibilities even if they are sensorily unimaginable and beyond the evidential capacity of stipulative imagining. After a brief introduction, Sect. 2 discusses imaginative resistance to help carve a niche for the kinds of inferences about which this essay is chiefly concerned. Section 3 provides three classic examples, along with a discussion of their similarities and differences. Section 4 recasts the notion of potential explanation in Lipton’s (Inference to the best explanation, Routledge, Abingdon, 2004) in order to accommodate inferences to possibility claims; Sect. 5 then attempts to characterise a principle underlying such inferences. Section 6 concludes by discussing how the proposal relates to other modal epistemologies, with emphasis on the potential of such inferences to produce genuinely new ideas.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
This echoes Yablo’s gloss on the imagination-perception analogy: “Just as someone who perceives that p enjoys the appearance that p is true, whoever finds p conceivable enjoys something worth describing as the appearance that it is possible” (Yablo, 1993, p. 5).
“[T]he principal constraint on assignments is certainty. I said that so long as we find P believable, epistemically possible in the strongest sense that it is true for all we know for certain, or possibly true for all we know for certain, we will be able to imagine P via stipulation or label. Let P be some proposition whose possibility we are trying to establish via imagining. The mere fact that we find P (or possibly P) believable, and hence are capable of making the assignments required to make P true in the imagined situation, is not good evidence for P’s possibility. Believability just is lack of certainty. (Let us use ‘non-certainty’ to denote lack of certainty; it avoids the unwanted connotations of ‘uncertain’.) It would be very odd if our non-certainty counted as evidence of P’s possibility” (Kung, 2010, p. 634). The principle I advance in Sect. 5 takes stipulation’s lack of probative force into account when allocating its role, namely as a gap-filler for uncontroversial details, the possibility of which will be granted by all parties in the debate at hand.
It appears that many have read Turing as claiming that winning the imitation game is a sufficient condition for the presence of mind, a claim which is difficult to maintain in the face of thought experiments such as Searle’s, (1981) “Chinese Room”. In this connection, it is interesting to note the probabilistic criteria that Turing offers, of winning 70% of the time, suggesting a probabilistic guide to the presence of a mind. As Oppy and Dowe, (2020, Sect. 4.4) note, this probabilistic aspect of Turing’s discussion is often overlooked.
Turing begins his paper “I propose to consider the question, “Can machines think?”” (Turing, 1950, p. 433). While it is true that Turing talks of ‘replacing’ this question with another—namely, that of whether a machine could win the imitation game—his proposed replacement is intended as a route to answering the first modal question, which he returns to, and after all refers to as “the main question” (heading of Sect. 6).
What more needs to be said? Perhaps the bridging assumption is that the nature of space—relative or absolute—is a matter of nomological or metaphysical necessity. In addition, an anonymous reviewer proposes: “If it is about nomological possibility, then the possibility claim plausibly implies the actuality claim. After all, if the imagined situation can only occur in absolute space and it can occur in the actual world, then the actual world has absolute space.” The assumption here may be that matters of metaphysics, such as whether space is absolute or relative, cannot affect whether some phenomenon is nomologically possible; hence if the two-sphere scenario must involve absolute space, and is nomologically possible, then so must every nomologically possible world (including, of course, the actual). However, if such further reasoning is given to establish what is actual, it nonetheless proceeds from a claim about what is possible, based on an inference to a possibility (that of absolute space), from a consideration of merely possible phenomena.
“To imagine an object as determinate is to imagine it as possessing the higher-order property … of possessing a determinate property for each of its determinables. There is a world of difference, then, between imagining an object as determinate—as possessing determinates for each of its determinables—and determinately imagining it—specifying in each case what the underlying determinate is” (Yablo, 1993, p. 28).
What counts as observable facts here can be thought of as turning on what the qualitative contents of our imaginings are. Whether these ought to include relatively high-level properties, such as being a cat, or exclusively colour-at-location depends on one’s theory of perception. As we saw in Sect. 2, following Kung, (2010), I distinguish qualitative from assigned contents, and take being a cat to fall under the latter category. However, I admit that alternative theories of perception could make the principle less useful—for instance, if one includes modal properties among the qualitative contents of percepts and imaginings, then perhaps we need not go beyond experience or imaginings of machines to determine whether they could think. The kinds of possibilities for which such inferences are useful are those for which confirmation by experience alone fails; if the qualitative content of an imagining alone would settle the issue, then an ampliative inference would be obsolete, as in the case of actual IBE and perception. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to provide a fleshed out theory of perception, I take it that the passage of time without change, the presence of absolute space and thinking machine are not merely ‘observable facts’, i.e. things which could be determined by looking. What is crucial for my purposes is that, when the principle is brought to bear in a disagreement, both parties agree on the possibility of the case as it is described; stipulation can play a significant role in fleshing out the case, but assuming that stipulation alone cannot determine what is possible, any such stipulations should in principle be traceable to the stripped down, colour-at-location qualitative content. Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this issue.
Recall that, for Kung, qualitative imagining presents a way that space could be filled around the perceiver (Kung, 2010, p. 637).
The goings-on in the two-sphere case can nonetheless be classified as “observable facts”—in the sense that they involve concrete objects that would leave an impression, were there an observer there to see them; it may also be permitted that a disembodied observer is present in the case, depending on the philosophical beliefs of the interlocutor.
Thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising this.
Having said this, Biggs and Wilson, (2017) have convincingly argued that the epistemic value of abductive principles does not depend on whether theories satisfying these principles are more likely to be true.
Faraci, (2013) raises this problem, as a modal analogue of the lottery paradox, albeit with regard to a different debate—concerning the objectivity of moral claims. Faraci proposes dropping the agglomeration rule, such that asserting a, b, c, etc. should not force us to assert their conjunction. By inferring to possibility—truth at some world—rather than truth at a particular world, I mean to avoid committing to this move.
Nonetheless, IBE is a realist mode of inference—it moves from epistemic considerations to truth claims; as such, the principle I have stated warrants inferences not merely to justified belief about modal space, but to what that space includes.
It should be noted here that Chalmers acknowledges the difficulty of adjudicating conceivability arguments, “particularly where strange ideas such as these [i.e. zombies] are concerned” (1996, 99), and goes on to offer alternative arguments against the logical supervenience of consciousness on the physical. It should also be said that, while Chalmers finds the logical possibility of zombies “obvious” (1996, 96), he goes beyond the mere affirmation of intuition, describing a system functionally isomorphic to that of a consciousness-producing brain to provide indirect support for the possibility of physical replicas lacking in consciousness (97). I would therefore not go so far as to say that adjudication is impossible for the modal intuitionist: it is possible, provided they are willing to extend their argument in such ways—indeed, explanationist considerations can be counted among these.
Thus I can be said to be, in Wirling’s, (2020) terms, a non-uniformist about modal epistemology.
References
Biggs, S. (2011). Abduction and modality. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 83(2), 283–326.
Biggs, S., & Wilson, J. (2017). The a priority of abduction. Philosophical Studies, 174(3), 735–758.
Brown, J. R. (2004). Why thought experiments transcend experience. In C. Hitchcock (Ed.), Contemporary debates in philosophy of science (pp. 23–43). Malden, Mass: Blackwell.
Chalmers, D. (1996). The conscious mind. Oxford University Press.
Faraci, D. (2013). Brown on mackie: Echoes of the lottery paradox. Philosophia, 41, 751–755.
Frankish, K. (2007). The anti-zombie argument. Philosophical Quarterly, 57, 650–666.
Gallois, A. (1974). Berkeley’s master argument. The Philosophical Review, 83(1), 55–69.
Gendler, T. (2013). Imagination. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = https://plato.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/encyclopedia/archinfo.cgi?entry=imagination
Gendler, T. S., & Hawthorne, J. (2002). Introduction. In T. Gendler & J. Hawthorne (Eds.), Conceivability and possibility (pp. 1–70). Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Hanrahan, R. (2007). Imagination and possibility. Philosophical Forum, 38(2), 125–146.
Hart, W. D. (1988). Engines of the soul. Cambridge University Press.
Kripke, S. (1981). Naming and necessity. Blackwell.
Kung, P. (2010). Imagining as a guide to possibility. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(3), 621–663.
Lewis, D. (1986). On the plurality of worlds. Blackwell.
Lipton, P. (2004). Inference to the best explanation. Routledge.
Locke, J. (1823). The Works of John Locke, a new edition, corrected, ten volumes. London.
Martin, M. G. F. (2002). The transparency of experience. Mind & Language, 17(4), 376–425.
Moran, R. (1994). The Expression of feeling in imagination. The Philosophical Review, 103(1), 75–106.
Newton, I. (1966). (Principia), Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, trans. F. Cajori. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press (original work published 1687).
Oppy, G. (2004). Can we Describe Possible Circumstances in which we would Have Most Reason to Believe that Time is Two-Dimensional?. Ratio (new series) XVII 1 March 2004: 67–83.
Oppy, G., & Dowe, D. (2020). The Turing Test. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2020 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2020/entries/turing-test/>.
Parsons, J. (2013). The Earth and the Aleph. Manuscript. Available at https://philpapers.org/archive/PARTEA-3.pdf . Accessed 28/12/20.
Peacocke, C. (1985). Imagination, experience and possibility: A Berkeleian view defended. In J. Foster & H. Robinson (Eds.), Essays on Berkeley (pp. 19–35). Oxford University Press.
Putnam, H. (1975). Mind, Language and Reality, Philosophical Papers ii. Cambridge University Press.
Schaffer, J. (2005). Quiddistic knowledge. Philosophical Studies, 123(1–2), 1–32.
Searle, J. (1981). Minds, brains, and programs. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 3, 417–457.
Shoemaker, S. (1969). Time without change. Journal of Philosophy, 66(12), 363–381.
Sider, T. (2011). Writing the book of the world. Oxford University Press.
Sorensen, R. (1992). Thought experiments. Oxford University Press.
Sorensen, R. (2016). Thought Experiments and Imagination. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Imagination. Routledge
Turing, A. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.
van Fraassen, B. (1989). Laws and Symmetry. Oxford University Press.
Weatherson, B. (2004). Morality, fiction, and possibility. Philosophers’ Imprint, 4(3), 1–27.
Wirling, Y. S. (2020). Non-uniformism about the epistemology of modality: Strong and weak. Analytic Philosophy, 61(2), 152–173.
Yablo, S. (1993). Is conceivability a guide to possibility? Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 53(1), 1–42.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to three anonymous referees and the editors for very helpful comments. Many of the ideas contained in this paper were developed during my time as a student at St Andrews and Arché and I am grateful to the philosophical community there for their innumerable discussions and feedback, as well as support from the AHRC and a Royal Institute of Philosophy Jacobsen Fellowship. Special thanks to my late PhD supervisor Katherine Hawley, whose positive influence cannot be overstated.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
This article belongs to the topical collection "Imagination and its Limits", edited by Amy Kind and Tufan Kiymaz.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Traynor, M. Beyond the limits of imagination: abductive inferences from imagined phenomena. Synthese 199, 14293–14315 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03421-z
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03421-z