After all, Berkeley subscribes to David Hume's (1739, 32) principle equating conceivability with possibility.

(22) Block and Stalnaker's first sense of conceivability is a version of what Chalmers (forthcoming 2002b) calls "secondary conceivability." Their second sense is a version of "primary conceivability," and in particular is close to Chalmers' "ideal primary negative conceivability." Block and Stalnaker note that this notion is a purely negative notion, so that the name "conceivability" is misleading.

Of these two claims, the conceivability thesis seems the most promising.

[1979a]: 'General Relativity and the Conceivability of Time Travel', Philosophy of Science, 46, pp.

In this paper, it is argued that Weak Modal Rationalism, which is the view that ideal primary positive conceivability entails primary metaphysical possibility, is self-defeating.

to make any sense (which is not to say it does), then conceivability

T1 is supported by introspection; T2 is supported by what Stoljar calls 'manifest supervenience' (31-3), whereby all other facts appear to supervene upon the physical; and T3 is rendered plausible by modal arguments such as the conceivability and knowledge arguments.

(12)I am assuming here that if we can imagine such a situation then it's possible--that conceivability, in other words, entails possibility.

But this argument of Hartshorne seems very problematic, for it is not at all evident that coherence is derivable from conceivability. As mentioned, I tend to accept Quine's and Barnes' position that contradictions, e.g., "the round square copula on Berkeley College" or "a barber who shaves every man who does not shave himself", must be conceivable in a sense, since we do grasp them as contradictory, and hence as unactualizable.

The important point here, however, is that the mere possibility or conceivability of any of these spatially necessary objects suffices to establish that it is possible that what exists at one place does necessarily determine what exists at another place.

Conceivability may be the best available guide to possibility, but it certainly is not an infallible one on the ordinary meaning of "conceivability".

The paper illustrates the former by showing that two of the most compelling antiphysicalist arguments about phenomenal experience--the modal argument of Kripke and the conceivability argument of Chalmers--are not sound if this claim is true.

I want to take on the question of what a class of arguments, usually called the Conceivability Arguments, have to say about the mind-body problem.

How To Avoid Mis-Reiding Hume's Maxim Of Conceivability, LEWIS POWELL

Appealing to the conceivability and intelligibility of a physical hypothesis is a perfectly legitimate response to such a predicament.