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Conceivability and possibility : some dilemmas for Humeans

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Berto_2018_Synthese_Humeans_CC.pdf (365.1Kb)
Date
06/2018
Author
Berto, Francesco
Schoonen, Tom
Keywords
Conceivability and possibility
Imagination
Mental imagery
Mental representation
Modal epistemology
B Philosophy (General)
Philosophy
Social Sciences(all)
T-NDAS
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Abstract
The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of P at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language. If the conceivability of P amounts to the pictorial imaginability of a situation verifying P, then the question is whether the imagination at issue works purely qualitatively, that is, only by phenomenological resemblance with the imagined scenario. If so, the range of situations imaginable in this way is too limited to have a significant role in modal epistemology. If not, imagination will involve some arbitrary labeling component, which turns out to be sufficient for imagining the impossible. And if the relevant imagination is neither linguistic nor pictorial, Humeans will appear to resort to some representational magic, until they come up with a theory of a ‘third code’ for mental representations.
Citation
Berto , F & Schoonen , T 2018 , ' Conceivability and possibility : some dilemmas for Humeans ' , Synthese , vol. 195 , no. 6 , pp. 2697-2715 . https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1346-7
Publication
Synthese
Status
Peer reviewed
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1346-7
ISSN
0039-7857
Type
Journal article
Rights
© The Author(s) 2017. Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Description
This research is published within the Project ‘The Logic of Conceivability’, funded by the European Research Council (ERC CoG), Grant Number 681404.
Collections
  • Philosophy Research
  • University of St Andrews Research
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/10023/15953

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