Illusory possibilities and imagining counterparts |
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Authors: | Janine Jones |
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Institution: | (1) College of Arts and Sciences Department of Philosophy, The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, PO Box 26170, 27402-6170 Greensboro, NC, USA |
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Abstract: | Given Kripke’s semantic views, a statement, such as ‘Water is H2O’, expresses a necessary a posteriori truth. Yet it seems that we can conceive that this statement could have been false; hence, it appears that we can conceive
impossible states of affairs as holding. Kripke used a de dicto strategy and a de re strategy to address three illusions that arise with respect to necessary a posteriori truths: (1) the illusion that a statement such as ‘Water is H2O’ possibly expresses a falsehood, (2) the illusion that conceivability can fail to latch on to a genuine metaphysical possibility,
and (3) the illusion that one can access a real metaphysical possibility by conceiving that water is not H2O. In this paper I argue that while Kripke’s de dicto strategy dispels (1), his strategies do not enable him to dispel (2) and (3). |
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Keywords: | conceivability metaphysical possibility imagining Yablo’ s psychoanalytic standard epistemic counterparts illusions of contingency |
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