Abstract
Modal Meinongianism—the version of Meinongianism invented by Graham Priest—presupposes that we can think about absolute impossibilities. I defend the view that we can, by tidying up a couple of loose ends in Priest’s arguments to this effect from his book Towards Non-Being.
It is impossible to construct a regular polygon of nineteen sides with ruler and compass; it is possible but very complicated to construct one of seventeen sides. In whatever sense I can imagine the possible construction, I can imagine the impossible construction just as well
David Lewis, On the Plurality of Worlds
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Notes
- 1.
Priest dealt both with intentional states directed toward objects, such as fearing John, dreaming of Obama, imagining a tree in the garden, and with so-called propositional states, such as fearing that John comes along, dreaming that Obama wins the elections again, imagining that the tree starts talking to me. In the following, we will deal only with the latter kind of states.
- 2.
Philosophers debate on the nature of absolute necessity, and thus impossibility, but it is fair to say that the three main kinds of absolute necessities/impossibilities are usually taken to be the logical, the mathematical and the metaphysical. I will not get into the issue of whether one of them is reducible to another (e.g., the mathematical to the logical, as it is for logicists).
- 3.
As Yablo (1993), p. 4, has remarked, in spite of that “in other words” it is doubtful that here Hume is really giving the same maxim twice. It is one thing to say that, when we (clearly) conceive something, what is conceived comes with the idea that it could exist embedded in by default. It is another thing to say that we can only imagine the possible. It is the latter claim that will be on stage in the following, as the target (HP).
- 4.
Contradictions are often invoked as a paradigmatic case of absolute impossibility, and will come handy later on, too. The example may not sound good in the context of a discussion of Priest’s work, given that he is (in)famous for believing that some contradictions are true. However, modal Meinongianism can be formulated as a consistent theory: one can be a modal Meinongian without thereby being a dialetheist.
- 5.
I am very grateful to the Editors of Synthese for allowing me to reuse that material.
- 6.
- 7.
Triggered by a nice suggestion by two anonymous reviewers.
- 8.
I do not buy this view either. Take a cognitive (as opposed to merely environmental) conception of information, and consider what can be learned by a rational, finite and fallible agent—one of us. We can learn that a complex formula, whose truth value we were ignorant of until we computed its long truth table, is a tautology. For all we knew before carrying out the computation, the formula’s being false was a way things could be. In this sense, pace Wittgenstein (6.1251), there are surprises in logic. A beautiful book defending this view is Jago (2014).
- 9.
I agree with Yablo on this: “Almost never in philosophy are we able to analyze an intentional notion outright, in genuinely independent terms: so that a novice could learn, say, what memory and perception were just by consulting their analyses. About all one can normally hope for is to locate the target phenomenon relative to salient alternatives, and to find the kind of internal structure in it that would explain some of its characteristic behavior.” (Yablo 1993, pp. 25–6).
- 10.
Here is a passage of Naming and Necessity, in which Kripke appears to endorse such an error theory. It is the famous example of the table: “But whatever we imagine counterfactually having happened to [the table] other than what actually did, one thing we cannot imagine happening to this thing is that it, given that it is composed of molecules, should still have existed and not have been composed of molecules. We can imagine having discovered that it wasn’t composed of molecules. But once we know that this is a thing composed of molecules—that this is the very nature of the substance of which it is made—we can’t then, at least if the way I see it is correct, imagine that this thing might have failed to have been composed of molecules.” (Kripke 1980, pp. 126–7).
- 11.
“There is something amiss when a claim of the type ‘Suppose that Socrates had never gone into philosophy...’ is met with the challenge to demonstrate how you know that it is Socrates that is the object of your supposition. The same might be said of the question how you know that the subject of the proposition that Socrates is a philosopher is the same as the subject of the proposition that Socrates was married [...]. The theme that unites the last two deflationary thoughts is that one can ‘give’ a possible world or a representational content in a non-qualitative way by relying on stipulation.” (Divers 2002, p. 272).
- 12.
“When I use the word ‘Socrates’ inside an explicitly worldly context, ‘at w’, or inside an implicitly worldly (modal or counterfactual) context [...] I do not thereby make it the case, nor do I come to know, that such a world is a possible world. It is this crucial point that underlies the complaint against [the claim that stipulative conceivability entails possibility]. It is one question how we know which objects are the objects of our de re modal thought and talk, and perhaps there stipulation has a legitimate role. It is another question altogether how we know what is modally true of those objects, and there stipulation has no legitimate role to play.” (Divers 2002, p. 273).
- 13.
There is a different issue concerning cases in which one supposedly fails to conceive what one meant to conceive, nicely pointed out to me by an anonymous referee. The issue has to do with one’s lacking certain information which is plainly required for the stipulation to succeed. I’ll just pick the referee’s example: one thinks one imagines that Goldbach’s Conjecture has been refuted, but one has misunderstood the content of Goldbach’s Conjecture. In fact, what the person labels thus is the claim that there is a greatest prime number. It seems to me that in this case one actually misdescribes what one is conceiving, but that this failure is just orthogonal to the distinction between the stipulative and telescopic conceptions. In particular, it has little to do with “insufficient granularity” in the sense relevant for van Inwagen’s point: one can imagine in the greatest detail the standard proof that there is no largest prime while mistakenly labeling the proved claim as ‘the negation of Goldbach’s Conjecture’.
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Berto, F. (2019). Modal Meinongianism: Conceiving the Impossible. In: Başkent, C., Ferguson, T. (eds) Graham Priest on Dialetheism and Paraconsistency. Outstanding Contributions to Logic, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25365-3_2
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