Modal Intuitions Research Articles

The development of modal intuitions: A test of two accounts.

Young children, unlike adults, deny that improbable events can happen. We test two accounts explaining this developmental shift. The development = reflection account posits that this shift is driven by an emerging ability to reflect on modal intuitions. In contrast, the development = intuition account posits that this shift is driven by changes in modal intuitions themselves, due to age-related changes in what people know and how they sample their knowledge and memories. These accounts make competing predictions about how long children and adults should take to make possibility judgments. In Experiment 1, we asked 123 children (39 5-year-olds, 42 7-year-olds, 42 9-year-olds; 49.60% White) and 40 adults (50% White) to judge the possibility of 78 ordinary, improbable, and impossible events and recorded their response times. In Experiment 2, we tested an additional 52 adults (42.32% White) who were under speeded conditions and thus less able to reflect before responding. Our results favor the development = intuition account. At all ages, people judged improbable events more slowly than ordinary or impossible events, and slow responding did not consistently predict affirmation over denial. Further, adults' possibility judgments did not change under speeded conditions. We also fit a drift-diffusion model to our data, which suggested that adults and children may sample different kinds of knowledge when generating intuitions. Our findings suggest that possibility judgments are often driven by modal intuitions with little reflection, and that a developmental shift in what children know and how knowledge is retrieved can explain why these intuitions change over time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Kant and the heuristic function of images: The poetics of scientific investigation

My reflections center upon the heuristic function of images in the creative process of producing scientific knowledge. I take as a starting point Leonel Ribeiro dos Santos’s idea of a transcendental heuristic in order to discuss the creative and original strength of scientific genius, here considered as talent or ability by means of which the intuitive faculty of imagination is placed at the service of the conceptual faculty of reason. My goal is to present the outlines of a transcendental theory that is consistent with the heuristic use of both concepts and images. My aim is not to adhere to the letter, but instead to the spirit, of Kantian philosophy in order to understand, in the context of contemporary physical theories, especially quantum theory, the non-representational function of intuitive images for explaining concepts that do not conform to any intuition. As applied to the specific case of quantum mechanics, I hold that the free play of imagination and understanding or reason is not restricted to the aesthetics of taste and the artistic production of artworks only, but is also extended to the cognitive and scientific production of theories. In my view, it is precisely this creative, fictional dimension of scientific theories that constitutes Kantian radical enlightenment in the case of scientific knowledge. Thus “Dare to know!” is also “Dare to create!”.

The blurred line between epistemic and metaphysical modalities in the modal epistemology of imagination

AbstractModal epistemologies that rely on a fallibilism about modal claims have been gaining traction over the years. This paper critically discusses the accounts of Kung (2009, 2010, 2016) and Dohrn (2018, 2019, 2020b) and argues that they are invariably susceptible to being read as entailing claims of epistemic possibility. Both Kung and Dohrn seek to ground modal intuitions on non‐modal ones, and primarily appeal to the modalizing capacity of imagination to aid in the discovery of modal truths. However, insofar as inference from non‐modal imagination to modal truths remains fallible, then no non‐ad hoc distinction can be made between substantiation of fallible metaphysically modal claims and infallible epistemically modal ones. This is because, barring an agent's infallible knowledge of modal truths, how these truths are argued for must attend the agent's imperfect epistemic access thereof, therefore entailing claims of modality consistent with her epistemic state—that is, claims of epistemic possibility. If modal epistemologies in general non‐modally ground their modal assertions in this fallible fashion, then they seem inevitably interpretable in terms of epistemic possibility as opposed to some non‐epistemic reading of metaphysical possibility.

Physicalism or Anti-physicalism: A Disjunctive Account

AbstractIn this paper, we make a case for the disjunctive view of phenomenal consciousness: consciousness is essentially disjunctive in being either physical or non-physical in the sense that it has both physical and non-physical possible instances. We motivate this view by showing that it undermines two well-known conceivability arguments in philosophy of mind: the zombie argument for anti-physicalism, and the anti-zombie argument for physicalism. By appealing to the disjunctive view, we argue that two hitherto unquestioned premises of these arguments are false. Furthermore, making use of the resources of this view, we formulate distinct forms of both physicalism and anti-physicalism. On these formulations, it is easy to see how physicalists and anti-physicalists can accommodate the modal intuitions of their opponents regarding zombies and anti-zombies. We conclude that these formulations of physicalism and anti-physicalism are superior to their more traditional counterparts.

The Incommensurable and the Visible: Gaetano Chiurazzi’s Ontology of Incommensurability and Merleau-Ponty’s Theory of Perception

In Dynamis. Ontologia dell’incommensurabile, Gaetano Chiurazzi offers an account of the philosophical sense and implications of the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes in ancient thought. In his study, Chiurazzi presents the scope of the idea of incommensurability in contrast to those theories that have interpreted perception as the primary access to reality. Chiurazzi claims that the discovery of incommensurable relations, such as that of “1/square root of 2,” which expresses the relation between the side and the diagonal of a square, introduces the conception of asymmetrical relations into Western epistemology and ontology. This conception finds in the modern idea of transcendental philosophy its mature formulation. In this paper, I draw on Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s proposal of a phenomenology of perception in order to critically evaluate the working assumption in Chiurazzi’s account that perception is the faculty of intuition that seizes upon the individual and therefore as “atomic” in nature.

¿Qué hace físicamente posible a un mundo posible?

There is a widely extended viewpoint about physical possibility, what we will call Standard Approach, which holds that the physically possible is delimited by the nomological structure of physical theories: to be physically possible is to be in accordance with the physical laws, to be physically impossible is to be prohibited by physical laws and to be physically necessary is to be demanded by the physical laws. However, it is possible to show that this approach is too relaxed and permissive when it comes to collecting and systematizing many of the modal intuitions present in the physical community. In this work we will argue, on the one hand, that the notion of physical possibility is more complex and richer than suggested by the standard approach and, on the other hand, that it is necessary to add some extra elements to the characterization of physical possibility in order to that it is adequate in scientific contexts.

The Limits of Modal Knowledge

Modal agnosticism is the view that we must be agnostic about whether things could have turned out differently. I argue that claims about unrealised possibilities (what I term ‘merely metaphysical modal claims’) are not justified by our modal intuitions, nor are they justified by any of the means proposed by philosophers. It follows that we do not have merely metaphysical modal knowledge, and that we must adopt modal agnosticism.

Modal arguments against materialism

AbstractWe review existing strategies for bringing modal intuitions to bear against materialist theories of consciousness, and then propose a new strategy. Unlike existing strategies, which assume that imagination (suitably constrained) is a good guide to modal truth, the strategy proposed here makes no assumptions about the probative value of imagination. However, unlike traditional modal arguments, the argument developed here delivers only the conclusion that we should not believe that materialism is true, not that we should believe that it is false.

Necessidade e possibilidade nas ciências históricas: Resultados semânticos de uma tradução modal contradiodoreana e de uma lógica temporal occasmista para o passado

Buscando interpretar certas sentenças modalizadas em ciências histórias, este artigo estabelece diferentes sentidos de “necessidade” e “possibilidade” e, dentro de lógicas temporais ramificadas para o passado, visa especialmente distinguir logicamente traduções de necessidade e possibilidade em instantes de tempo de traduções análogas em ramos históricos. Além disso, também explicitamos vantagens na abordagem por ramos históricos para capturar as diferentes intuições modais dos historiadores e naturalistas que reconstroem um passado provável/factual de diferentes modos (mas não de qualquer modo).

Individual essentialism in biology

A few philosophers of biology have recently explicitly rejected Essential Membership, the doctrine that if an individual organism belongs to a taxon, particularly a species, it does so essentially. But philosophers of biology have not addressed the broader issue, much discussed by metaphysicians on the basis of modal intuitions, of what is essential to the organism. In this paper, I address that issue from a biological basis, arguing for the Kripkean view that an organism has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, essence. The arguments appeal to the demands of biological explanation and are analogous to arguments that I have given elsewhere that a taxon has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, essence. These conclusions about the essences of individuals and taxa yield an argument for Essential Membership. Finally, I cast doubt on LaPorte’s objection to that doctrine arising from the view that a species cannot survive having a daughter.

The Impact of John Locke’s Tabula Rasa and Kant’s faculty of intuition on the Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats: Implications and Applications

Both Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and John Locke (1632-1704) have transformed the thought and ideology of almost all walks of life (culture, literature, science, politics, and philosophy) in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries and beyond. This paper explores the impact of their philosophy on the Romantics' poetry. Thus, the paper argues that the Romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats had refuted John Locke's Tabula Rasa and adapted Kant's faculty of intuition to create their poetry. Adapting Kant's faculty of intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a new theory of knowledge, the Romantics denounced Locke's tabula rasa in Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Unlike Locke, Kant treats the mind as active organ. For this reason the Romantics took up Kant's theory and left behind Locke's tabula rasa. This paper (a study) aims to find where Locke’s tabula rasa and Kant's intuition converge and diverge. The study provides a historical and theoretical background of these philosophies and their impact on the Romantics under study. Thus, it paves the way for further investigation for those who are concerned to tackle any angle of the study.

The Impact of John Locke's Tabula Rasa and Kant's Faculty of Intuition on the Poetry of Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats: Implications and Applications

Both Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) and John Locke (1632-1704) have transformed the thought and ideology of almost all walks of life (culture, literature, science, politics, and philosophy) in the eighteenth, nineteenth centuries and beyond. This paper explores the impact of their philosophy on the Romantics' poetry. Thus, the paper argues that the Romantics Wordsworth, Coleridge and Keats had refuted John Locke's Tabula Rasa and adapted Kant's faculty of intuition to create their poetry. Adapting Kant's faculty of intuition in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), a new theory of knowledge, the Romantics denounced Locke's tabula rasa in Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Unlike Locke, Kant treats the mind as active organ. For this reason the Romantics took up Kant's theory and left behind Locke's tabula rasa. This paper (a study) aims to find where Locke’s tabula rasa and Kant's intuition converge and diverge. The study provides a historical and theoretical background of these philosophies and their impact on the Romantics under study. Thus, it paves the way for further investigation for those who are concerned to tackle any angle of the study.

The cognitive source of philosophical intuitions: Troubles for the etiological project

The advent of experimental philosophy has generated a renewed interest in the nature of philosophical intuitions. This has led many to assume that understanding the psychological processes that generate philosophical intuitions will provide a much needed source of answers for various questions about their nature. It is widely assumed that if we are to gain a good sense of the reliability of philosophical intuitions (and the degree to which experimental philosophy challenges their role in philosophy) it is critical to learn more about the sort of cognitive faculties and processes that produce them. However, here, I'm going to present a more pessimistic outlook about what we should expect from such a project in the case of philosophical intuitions. More specifically, I'll suggest that there are two central problems that prevent a deeper understanding of the cognitive source of intuitions from doing much of what we would like it to do. The first problem is that for an important range of philosophical intuitions, it is doubtful that there is a stable set of cognitive processes and mechanisms generating them that is sufficiently universal to allow for the sort of generalizations we would like. Philosophical intuitions are likely created by an assortment of varying psychological operations, and that learning about how a particular intuition is created is unlikely to tell us much about how other intuitions are formed. In short, there is no faculty of intuition in any meaningful sense. I call this the 'Etiological-Diversity Problem'. The second problem stems from the fact that one of the primary things we want knowledge of the intuition-producing cognitive machinery to tell us about is the reliability of the intuitions they produce. However, this expectation gets the normal order backwards. The evaluation of cognitive processes or mechanisms typically requires a prior evaluation of the normative status of the states it produces in different contexts, distinguishing proper functioning and competence from improper functioning and performance errors by virtue of the quality of the mechanism's output. It is far less clear how this order can be reversed. Consequently, it is hard to see how an understanding of intuition-producing mechanisms will allow us to evaluate the epistemic status of philosophical intuitions without already having such an evaluation in hand. I call this the 'The Secondary Calibration Problem'. The upshot is that even though I believe there is much to learn about the etiology of intuitions that will be useful, these problems severely hamper our ability to answer many of the central questions we have about the nature and trustworthiness of philosophical intuitions.

The Future as an Undefined and Open Time: A Bergsonian Approach

The questions what the future will bring and if and how it is possible to anticipate coming events have intrigued human beings since the dawn of time. Over the course of the centuries human beings have found better and more sophisticated ways to calculate and predict certain prospective occurrences, for example earthquakes, thunderstorms et cetera. In the Europe of the nineteenth century this potential of rational (natural) sciences led to the idea that it would once be possible to anticipate everything that will happen in the universe, going as far as that it should even become predictable how human beings will develop and which actions they will choose. The French philosopher Henri Bergson verbally fought against this kind of belief and developed a so-called process ontology, which claims that nothing in the universe is ever fixed. In fact everything that exists is an ongoing and evolutionary process (élan vital) without a fixed goal. And since—according to Bergson—our rational mind is solely capable of understanding and therefore predicting rigid entities but not processes, any belief in the complete predictability of the universe must be abandoned. Instead, we should focus on the possibilities of an open, spontaneous and creative future, which we will only then be able to understand, if we get more in touch with our so-called intuitive faculty, which is able to fathom a process in its processual state.

The space of possibilities of dispositional essentialism

How we define the space of possibilities of dispositional essentialism (DE)—that is, the set of possible worlds that are genuinely possible from the point of view of DE—has important consequences for central modal debates such as how to understand the concept of essence or the relation between DE and the necessity of laws of nature. In order to define DE’s space of possibilities we need to explore DE’s consequences regarding both necessity and possibility. Unfortunately, the notion of possibility has not received much attention within the DE literature. In this paper, I attempt to fill this gap. I argue that the standard way of understanding possibility found in the literature—a proposition is possible iff it expresses the manifestation of some actual disposition—needlessly restricts the space of possibilities by not accepting global and absolute possibilities, including some alien properties, as genuinely possible. I propose instead to accept a more permissive understanding of possibility: a proposition is possible iff it does not contradict any of the necessities that follow from the core commitments of DE. This allows dispositionalists to expand their modal space and to account for modal intuitions that may otherwise undermine the tenability of DE.

Frege’s philosophy of geometry

In this paper, I critically discuss Frege’s philosophy of geometry with special emphasis on his position in The Foundations of Arithmetic of 1884. In Sect. 2, I argue that that what Frege calls facultyof intuition in his dissertation (1873) is probably meant to refer to a capacity of visualizing geometrical configurations structurally in a way which is essentially the same for most Western educated human beings. I further suggest that according to his Habilitationsschrift (1874) it is through spatial intuition that we come to know the axioms of Euclidean geometry. In Sect. 3, I argue that Frege seems right in claiming in The Foundations, §14 that the synthetic nature of the Euclidean axioms follows from the fact that they are independent of one another and of the primitive laws of logic. If the former were dependent on (provable from) the latter, they would be analytic in Frege’s sense of analyticity. But then they would not be independent of one another and due to their mutual provability would lose their status as axioms of Euclidean geometry, since according to Frege an axiom of a theory T is per definitionen unprovable in T. I further argue that only by invoking pure spatial intuition can Frege “explain” the (alleged) epistemological status of the axioms of Euclidean geometry completely: their synthetic a priori nature. Finally, I argue that his view about independence in The Foundations, §14 seems to clash with his conception of independence in his mature period. In Sect. 4, I scrutinize Frege’s somewhat vague, but unduly neglected remarks in The Foundations, §26 on space, spatial intuition and the axioms of Euclidean geometry. I argue that for the sake of coherence Frege should have said unambiguously that space is objective, that it is independedent not only of our spatial intuition, but of our mental life altogether including our judgements about space, instead of encouraging the possible conjecture that in his view it contains an objective and a subjective component. I further argue that for Frege the objectivity of both space and the axioms of Euclidean geometry manifests itself in our universal and compulsory acknowledgement of the Euclidean axioms as true. I conclude Sect. 4 by arguing that there is a conflict between the subjectivity of our spatial intuitions as stressed in The Foundations, §26 and Frege’s thesis in his dissertation that the axioms of Euclidean geometry derive their validity from the nature of our faculty of intuition. To resolve this conflict, I propose that in the light of his avowed realism in The Foundations Frege could have replaced his early thesis by saying that although we come to know the axioms of Euclidean geometry through spatial intuition and are justified in acknowledging them as true on the basis of geometrical intuition, their truth is independent not only of the nature of our faculty of intuition and singular acts of intuition, but of our mental processes and activities in general, including the inner mental act of judging. In Sect. 5, I argue that Frege most likely did not adopt Kant’s method of acquiring geometrical knowledge via the ostensive construction of concepts in spatial intuition. In contrast to Kant, Frege holds that the axioms of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry express state of affairs about space obtaining independently of our spatial intuition. In Sect. 6, I conclude with a summarized assessment of Frege’s philosophy of geometry.

Naturalistic Transcendentalism

Transcendentalism was a philosophical movement that arose prior to Darwin publishing The Origin of Species. It arose out of the Enlightenment, in which the importance of natural law in the working of the universe was recognized. Ralph Waldo Emerson was interested in exploring religious questions from the point of view of the enlightenment. For him, the human faculty of intuition was very interesting. After Darwin was published, most of science lost interest in exploring human intuition partly because no naturalistic basic for it was known. Today, it is appropriate to return to the study of transcendentalism, building on what was done in the 19th century, but with a 21st century understanding of the laws of nature. Much work can be done from this perspective, possibly developing a new philosophy of the humanities. This is the defining work by the author of this approach to philosophy.

ÌNIN Holographic Evolving: Toward a Civilization of Symphony

Until we make linear questions, we will receive linear answers. And when will we be able to see the nature of all that exists?This research proposes a new paradigm not based on new orders of ideas, but on essential human faculties and specifically on still unexplored qualities of intuition. Just as human beings started a new interrelation with reality within the shift from pre-linguistic to linguistic era, so today we can start to interface reality through an unexplored intuitive faculty, within the shift from logic thinking into an ‘analogic-intuitive’ consciousness.

Natural Properties and Atomicity in Modal Realism

Abstract The paper pinpoints certain unrecognized difficulties that surface for recombination and duplication in modal realism when we ask whether the following inter-world fixity claims hold true: 1) A property is perfectly natural in a world iff it is perfectly natural in every world where it is instantiated; 2) Something is mereologically atomic in a world iff all of its duplicates in every world are atomic. In connection to 1), the hypothesis of idlers prompts four variants of Lewis’s doctrine of perfectly natural properties, all deemed unsatisfactory for the purposes of duplication and recombination. By means of 2), instead, we show that the principle of recombination does not countenance the atomicity or non-atomicity of duplicates; but it should, because it is genuinely possible that: a) something, which is atomic, is non-atomic; and b) something, which is non-atomic, is atomic. In discussing 1) and 2), the paper substantiates a tension in Lewis’s metaphysics between modal intuitions and the reliance on the natural sciences.

Philosophy and the Mind/Body Problem

AbstractThe thesis of the paper is that it is an illusion to think that the mind/body problem is one that philosophy can expect to solve. The basic reason is that the problem is one of determining the real nature of conscious states, and philosophy lacks the tools to work this out. It is argued that anti-materialist arguments in philosophy tend to rely on modal intuitions which lack any support. It is then argued that pro-materialist arguments, such as those of Smart and of Papineau, are dubious because they either yield a conclusion that is too conditional on what other types of research might discover, or rely on premises that anyone who is not already a materialist can simply query. Even if these points are correct the main thesis remains fairly speculative, but at least some support for it is presented.