Imaginability, conceivability, possibility and the mind-body problem

Philosophical Studies

Volumn 87, Issue 1, 1997, Pages 61-85

  Hill, Christopher S ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 27844605335     PISSN: 00318116     EISSN: 15730883     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1023/A:1017911200883     Document Type: Article

References (22)

1. See Saul A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980).
2. See also Kripke's "Identity and Necessity" in Stephen P. Schwartz (ed.), Naming, Necessity, and Natural Kinds (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977), 66-101.
3. W.D. Hart, Engines of the Soul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988);
4. Stephen Yablo, "The Real Distinction Between Mind and Body," Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Supplementary Volume 16 (1990), 149-201;
5. Stephen Yablo, "Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?" Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 53 (1993), 1-42;
6. David Chalmers, The Conscious Mind: In Search of a Theory of Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
7. Kripke, Naming and Necessity, p. 152.
8. Kripke says that the model illustrated by the heat example is "the only model [he] can think of." See Kripke, "Identity and Necessity," p. 101.
9. Thomas Nagel, "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" The Philosophical Review 83 (1974), 435-450.
10. Quoted from Nagel, ibid., footnote 11. Oddly, the ideas in this footnote have not received any attention from the contemporary defenders of Kripke's argument, nor, as far as I know, from any of Kripke's other commentators.
11. See, e.g. the papers collected in Roger N. Shepherd and Lynn Cooper (eds.), Mental Images and Their Transformations (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).
12. Of course, the interpretation of Shepherd's results is a matter of controversy. Not everyone would agree with the asessment offered above. For a quite different view, see Zenon Pylyshyn, "The Imagery Debate: Analog Media Versus Tacit Knowledge," in Ned. Block (ed.), Imagery (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 151-205.
13. Ronald A. Finke, "Mental Imagery and the Visual System," The Scientific American 1986, 88-95. The quoted passage is on p. 92.
14. Ibid., p. 88.
15. 2O, by saying that they are due to image-splicing mechanisms of the sort described in the text. 1 ' As indicated in the previous note, I here mean to be proposing an explanation of imagination-based intuitions of separability. There is one respect in which the present sketch of the explanation is incomplete. As I see it, the "splicing" mechanisms operate to produce an intuition to the effect that it is possible that p only when a subject is not already in possession of a "defeater" for that intuition that is, only when a subject is not already in possession of reasons for believing that it is necessary that not-p. Nothing is said about the inhibiting effects of such defeaters in the text. I am abstracting from considerations having to do with defeaters in the present section because I want there to be one place in the paper in which the main idea is presented without being accompanied by a forest of qualifications. However, when we consider conceivability-based intuitions of separability in section III, I will be at pains to acknowledge the role of defeaters in inhibiting intuitions of separability. See especially the penultimate and ante-penultimate paragraphs of Section III.
16. See Christopher S. Hill, "Why Cartesian Intuitions Are Compatible With the Identity Thesis," Philosophy and Phénoménologie-al Research 42 (1981), 254265. There is a related discussion in my Sensations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 90-95 and 96-98. Like Nagel's footnote, my discussions of Kripke's argument appear not to have been answered by any of the contemporary defenders of the argument.
17. Several arguments that have been known to lead to enlightenment are collected in the author's Sensations, chapters 2-A.
18. Actually, there are two ways in which one can fail to be in possession of the standard a posteriori reasons for affirming the necessary coextensiveness of the concept of heat and the concept of molecular motion. First, as noted in the text, one can be ignorant of the scientific account of the nature of heat - that is, of the empirical theory which implies that heat is identical to molecular motion. Second, one can be in possession of this theory, but not be fully aware that the theory gives one grounds for asserting that heat is necessarily identical to molecular motion. That is to say, it is possible to be in possession of all of the relevant scientific facts, but to fail for one reason or another to appreciate fully and nonconfusedly the metaphysical implications of those facts. (As I see it, there is a fairly strong tendency to fail to appreciate the metaphysical implications in question a tendency that can only be fully eradicated by considering the Marcus/Kripke argument for the necessity of identity. This is why twentieth century philosophers have sometimes experienced intuitions to the effect that heat is separable from molecular motion.)
19. The line of thought presented here is in some ways similar to the "property dualism argument" that is presented in Stephen White, "Curse of the Qualia," Synthese 68 (1986), 333-368. (See in particular pp. 351-353.) By the same token, the answer to this line of thought that I give in the remainder of section IV can be taken as a reply to White's argument. (Also, I believe that readers of section IV will be able to see that it provides type-materialists with a basis for answering Frank Jackson's knowledge argument.
20. See Jackson's "Epiphenomenal Qualia," Philosophical Quarterly 32 (1982), 127-136,
21. and his "What Mary Didn't Know," Journal of Philosophy 83 (1986), 291-295.)
22. The question broached in this final section deserves a great deal more attention than I am able to give it in a paper that is primarily concerned with other matters. I hope to return to it on another occasion.