The Inconceivable Popularity of Conceivability Arguments

Abstract

Famous examples of conceivability arguments include: (i) Descartes' argument for mind-body dualism; (ii) Kripke's 'modal argument' against psychophysical identity theory; (iii) Chalmers' 'zombie argument' against materialism; and (iv) modal versions of the ontological argument for theism. In this paper we show that for any such conceivability argument, C, there is a corresponding 'mirror argument', M. M is deductively valid and has a conclusion that contradicts C's conclusion. Hence a proponent of C-henceforth, a 'conceivabilist'-can be warranted in holding that C's premises are conjointly true only if she can find fault with one of M's premises. But M's premises-of which there are just two-are modeled on a pair of C's premises. The same reasoning that supports the latter supports the former. For this reason a conceivabilist can repudiate M's premises only on pain of severely undermining C's premises. We conclude on this basis that all conceivability arguments, including each of (i)-(iv), are fallacious.

Consciousness and the Laws of Physics

“…In that case, it follows that zombies are not conceivable after all, or at least they are not conceivable in a way that implies possibility. This point has been made in different ways in the literature; see Balog (1999Balog ( , 2012, Frankish (2007), Brown (2010), andCampbell et al (2017).…”

Expanding Observability via Human-Machine Cooperation

“…Can unaided human conceivability negotiate an agreement between conceived observability counterfactuals and observable, yet so far unobserved or unconceived, phenomena? The intricate works on conceivability provided a host of anthropocentric perspectives on the 1 petr.spelda@fsv.cuni.cz 2 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-022-09636-0 2 question (e.g., Yablo 1993;Tidman 1994;Hill 1997;Szabo and Hawthorne 2002;Chalmers 2002;Kung 2010;Rescher 2020) and some even challenged the consistency of conceivability (Campbell et al 2017;Fiocco 2020). There is an underexplored connection between conceivability and generalisations from observed states of affairs that can shed a new light on the relation between conceived observability counterfactuals and observable, yet so far unobserved or unconceived, phenomena.…”

Consciousness, Conceivability, and Intrinsic Reduction

“…A number of recent papers (Bayne 1988;Marton 1998;Sturgeon 2000;Frankish 2007;Brown 2010;Campbell et al 2017;VandenHombergh 2017) have pointed out that conceivability arguments against physicalism are apparently sound only if physicalism is inconceivable. For ease of reference, and a bit more precisely:…”

“…Section 3 considers two attempted defenses of (INEP). These are drawn largely from the authors mentioned above: Marton (1998) andSturgeon (2000) suggest endorsing the modal logic S5, while Frankish (2007), Brown (2010), andCampbell et al (2017) rely on an ''analytic'' 3 assumption about the conditional truth of physicalism. Each of these attempts succeeds in justifying something quite like (INEP), but only at the cost of introducing new premises or disagreeable complexity.…”