Abstract
Appealing to imagination for modal justification is very common. But not everyone thinks that all imaginings provide modal justification. Recently, Gregory (2010) and Kung (Philos Phenomenol Res 81(3):620–663, 2010) have independently argued that, whereas imaginings with sensory imageries can justify modal beliefs, those without sensory imageries don’t because of such imaginings’ extreme liberty. In this essay, I defend the general modal epistemological relevance of imagining. I argue, first, that when the objections that target the liberal nature of non-sensory imaginings are adequately developed, those objections also threaten the sensory imaginings. So, if we think that non-sensory imaginings are too liberal for modal justification, we should say the same about sensory imaginings. I’ll finish my defense by showing that, when it comes to deciding between saying that all imaginings are prima facie justificatory and saying that no imaginings are justificatory, there is an independent reason for accepting the former.
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Notes
This kind of conceivability-based modal epistemology is defended by Yablo in ‘Is Conceivability a Guide to Possibility?’ (1993) and is further developed by Geirsson (2005). Williamson (2007) is difficult to classify. Although he argues that we have access to modal truths only via learning about counterfactuals, according to his view, it is via imaginings that we learn about counterfactual truths. So, there is an indirect sense in which Williamson’s view is also conceivability-based. It is worth noting that Imaginative Conservatism is a very weak claim. It does not rule out other sources of modal justification. Imagining is just a sufficient condition for prima facie modal justification, not a necessary condition. So, for example, Roca-Royes’s (2011) objection against conceivability-based modal epistemology does not work against Imaginative Conservatism.
Note that, although I say Imaginative Conservatism is a Yablo-style principle, it is not committed to every detail of Yablo’s particular modal epistemology. For example, Yablo draws the distinction between objectual and propositional imaginings. And he thinks that the latter piggybacks on the former in providing modal justification. I remain deliberately non-committal when I say that conceiving and imagining are attitudes, leaving open whether they are attitudes to objects or to propositions. The subsequent discussion does not hinge on this distinction.
I would like to thank Ross Cameron for pointing me to Gregory’s work.
Talk of ‘labels’ and ‘assignments’ is Kung’s (2010) terminology, not Gregory’s. I borrow Kung’s terminology here because his framework for describing the different components in an imagining is developed in more detail.
Geirsson (2005) makes a similar point about the inconceivability of contradiction. But I disagree with him when he says that this is due to the fact that we cannot understand contradiction. Non-sensory conceiving should not be identified with understanding. And that is exactly because we do understand contradiction; otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to understand a reductio argument. (See also Yablo (1993) for a similar point.) Here I am not arguing that plain contradiction is inconceivable; I am stating as an introspective fact about our propositional attitudes that I cannot conceive of contradictions.
This is a reason to reject Currie & Ravenscroft’s (2002) view that non-sensory imagination/conceiving just is assuming (9). Similarly, Ichikawa and Jarvis (2012) defend the view that non-sensory imagination just is some kind of supposing. But to avoid the kind of worry I raise here, they add that imagining that p is supposing that p and finding no absurdity among p’s immediate logical consequences. Adding the bit about no immediate logical absurdity is to avoid the imagining of the plain inconsistencies, which can be supposed as I pointed out. Technically, that extra bit can do the job. I have my concerns about Ichikawa & Jarvis’ approach, but addressing that is beyond the scope of this paper. Instead, I will just point out that, by adding that extra restriction on imagining, we are already admitting that imagining is more restrictive than supposing and hence one can’t directly infer from what supposing can’t justify to what imagining can’t justify (That is not what Ichikawa & Jarvis does).
Here I am just playing along with Kung’s claim that we can imagine impossibilities. Kripke famously disagrees. He thinks that cases where we seem to conceive of something impossible are deceptive (e.g., we are not really conceiving that Hesperus is not identical to Phosphorus when we appear to do so). Although Kripke is very influential on the contemporary discussions of modality, I do not think this particular view is widely accepted. Although it is plausible to say that we are occasionally mistaken when we think we are conceiving of something impossible, it is not widely accepted that this is always the case. For example, one of the things that Chalmers’s popular two-dimensional framework does is to pull apart two different layers/dimensions of mental content (primary vs. secondary intension). By doing so it allows conceivability (possibility along the primary intension) and metaphysical possibility (possibility along the secondary intension) to come apart. It is conceivable that water is not \(\hbox {H}_{2}\hbox {O}\) in Chalmers’s framework. See also Kung (2016: footnote 11) and Ichikawa and Jarvis (2012) about the Kripkean view that we cannot imagine the impossible. Furthermore, since I am granting Kung the point that we can imagine impossibility, I set aside Byrne’s (2007) view. This view holds that to say that p is conceivable just is to say that p is possible, not only because the two can come apart, but also because, presumably, I can coherently and meaningfully say that they come apart.
Yablo, for example, would have a major qualm with Kung’s claim that believability is the major restriction on non-sensory imagining.
On a similar note, Gregory writes: ‘Those are good questions and I’ve not got answers to them. [...] But the queries just raised don’t undermine the claim that sensory imaginings produce appearances of possibility; they merely underscore how hard it is to provide a philosophically adequate description of what’s going on when imaginings produce such appearances’ (2010, p. 332). I find such kind of hand-waving remark dialectically problematic, particularly in a context where Gregory is raising an argument against the epistemic relevance of non-sensory imaginings.
It is instructive to observe that it would not be helpful simply to point out that, with all the Kripkean necessary a posteriori truths around, it is easier to find non-sensory imaginings of impossibilities than to find sensory imaginings of impossibilities. The fact that it is easier does not mean it is too easy. Even if it is easier for non-sensory imaginings to get modal truths wrong, that would not explain why non-sensory imaginings do not provide modal justification at all.
I say ‘in a sense’, because Fiocco doesn’t make the distinction between sensory and non-sensory conceiving.
This is why I call my main thesis Imaginative Conservatism. It should be noted that Imaginative Conservatism is neutral with respect to Huemer’s Phenomenal Conservatism, which says that seemings give us prima facie justification. Imaginative Conservatism remains neutral in the sense that it says nothing about seemings at all. As we have seen earlier, Gregory believes that if imaginings can offer modal justification at all this must be done via generating seemings of possibilities. And he believes that non-sensory imaginings do not generate modal seemings. In Sect. 2, I granted Gregory the assumption and played along; I argued that Gregory has offered no good reason to think that non-sensory imaginings produce no modal seemings. So there is no reason for an advocate of Phenomenal Conservatism like Gregory to reject Imaginative Conservatism. But that does not mean I am committed to the claim that imaginings provide modal justification only if they generate modal seemings. A defender of Imaginative Conservatism has the option to reject Phenomenal Conservatism (perhaps by denying that there are such things as seemings). In fact, as the argument [1] - [4] shows, Imaginative Conservatism can be defended on the basis of being conservative about the standing epistemic practices, with no mentioning of seemings at all. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for pressing me to clarify the relation between my view and Phenomenal Conservatism.
It has been argued that to say that p is conceivable just is to say that p is possible and that, because of this, it is wrong to conclude that conceivability is evidence for possibility. But we must reject this argument provided that we, like Kung, accept that something impossible can be conceived.
Questions about this single-minded conception of epistemic rationality have, in recent years, been raised not only by those who challenge epistemic consequentialism (e.g., Berker 2013), but also by some virtue epistemologists (e.g., Montmarquet 1993), by philosophers defending the idea of pragmatic encroachment (e.g., Fantl and McGrath 2009), and by feminist metaphysicians following Haslanger’s ameliorative project (2000, 2006). They all, in their own way, try to explore the idea that there are factors that can serve as reasons for theory choice that do not involve relating us to the relevant truths.
I could be wrong and there might be other ways to motivate Truth Relating. I don’t have an argument to show that this is the only way other than that this is the only promising way I can see.
Note that saying that my gun is bad particularly for killing this very zombie Z does not immediately imply that it is irrational for me to pick my gun to kill Z. For, in picking my gun to kill Z, I might not be in a position to know that my gun is particularly bad for killing Z. We need to separate the metaphysical issue from the epistemic issue. Job Failed is about the metaphysical issue of what constitutes the goodness of an instrument for a particular job in a particular situation. What is rational for one to do at a time, however, is partly an epistemic issue, depending partly on whether one knows at the time which instrument is really good. Sometimes, we have to act by betting on what is good generally and hope that it is also good particularly. But the mere fact that it is rational to bet on something to work does not make that thing actually a good instrument for the job.
If one resists the substitution, one basically resists the truth-targeting instrument conception of epistemic justification.
See Maitzen (1995) and Cruz and Pollock (2004) for an argument in a similar spirit. This kind of argument is, as Maitzen points out, analogous to the argument against rule utilitarianism that it either turns into some form of rule worshipping or collapses into act utilitarianism. My argument, however, does not purport to challenge externalism as, e.g., Cruz and Pollock (2004) does. I only question the motivation for accepting Truth-Relating as a necessary condition for epistemic justification; it may still be reasonable to consider certain externalist relations to truth to be sufficient conditions for epistemic justification and, hence, externalism could still be well motivated.
As Maitzen (1995) points out, this observation (mis-)leads some philosophers to think that all it takes to have knowledge is to have true beliefs—justification is redundant. Going on a slightly different route, Steglich-Petersen (2009) defends the truth-aiming conception of epistemic justification by embracing infallibilism (see also, Littlejohn (2012) who argues that when a belief is false the best we have is an epistemic excuse from epistemic blame, not justification; and the intuition against infallibilism is based on confusing excuse and justification). It is also interesting to note that, defending infallibilism of perceptual justification, instead of eschewing justification, McDowell (2011) is led to think that all it takes to have perceptual knowledge is justified belief—truth is redundant.
I think this objection is similar in spirit to Peacocke’s (2002) Integration Challenge about modality.
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I would like to thank Ross Cameron, Brie Gertler, and Harold Langsam for commenting on multiple early drafts of this paper and for their patience with my stubbornness in philosophical conversations. My gratitude also goes to Matt Duncan, Trenton Merricks, Peter Tan, and the audience in the departmental retreat of the Corcoran Department of Philosophy, University of Virginia for their valuable feedback. I must also thank Nick Rimell and Jim Darcy, who kindly offered to help me with the linguistic aspect of the paper. Finally, I am grateful to the anonymous reviewers of Synthese for their suggestions that helped make this a much better paper.
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Lam, D. Is imagination too liberal for modal epistemology?. Synthese 195, 2155–2174 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1329-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-017-1329-8