Counter-Conceivability Again

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with the epistemology of metaphysical possibility implicit in the famous argument against physicalism about the mental outlined in the third lecture of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. Kripke’s argument presupposes that conceivability remains the best possible indicator of possibility, even where it is metaphysical possibilities, rather than conceptual possibilities, that are concerned. The chapter argues that this principle is good only when the concepts which frame the relevant imaginative exercise are adequate to the essential nature of the items for which a putative possibility is being entertained. The result is that metaphysical impossibilities may, in certain circumstances, be perfectly lucidly conceivable; and hence that the conceivability of pain’s coming apart from any particular supposed physical identification of it is no indication of a genuine possibility for pain unless the phenomenal concept of pain is adequate to the nature of pain—which physicalism denies.