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12 - A guide to possibility? of an Outline of a Proto-Theory of Causation" A COUPLE OF THOUSAND YEARS BEFORE HUME made the remark that inspired the counterfactual theory of causation, Plato said something that bears on the principal problems for that theory.
The necessitarians argue that conceivability is not a guide to possibility.
For example, one could argue that inconceivability is a reliable guide to impossibility, while conceivability is a not a reliable guide to possibility.
On one widely-discussed view of the epistemology of modality, conceivability is taken to be a (prima facie) guide to possibility.
For example, Carrie Jenkins (2010) offers a non-rationalist account of conceivability grounded in a theory of concepts, and Peter Kung (2010) has developed a sensory-based theory of imagination as a guide to possibility.
In this case, a plausible reply is simply that fiction delivers no guidance to conceptual investigations: conceivability may well be a guide to possibility, but literary fantasy is by itself no evidence of conceivability (van Inwagen 1993: 229).
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David Chalmers thinks that good thought experiments can be a guide to possibilities if the entailments of conceivability and possibility that he defends are sound (p. 153).
And work in modal epistemology has focused on the extent to which imaginability and its cousin conceivability can serve as guides to possibility.
In response, (Chalmers 2002a, §10 11; 2006a, §5) argues that (i) unknowable essences are controversial and may be incoherent, (ii) the 2D framework can still capture what is possible for all we can know, and (iii) there will still be at least one metaphysical possibility for every apriori coherent scenario, so apriori coherence is still a failsafe guide to metaphysical possibility.
This suggests that apriori coherence is a fallible guide to genuine possibility (Yablo 1999, 2000b).
The "golden triangle" also involves a distinctive rationalist account of modal epistemology, according to which ideal apriori conceivability is a fail-safe guide to metaphysical possibility.
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
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