If you met someone who said with a straight face “Of course I can imagine something that is physically identical to a chair, but lacks the fundamental chairness that chairs in our experience partake of… and is therefore merely a fake chair, although it will pass all our physical tests of being-a-chair nevertheless,” would you consider that claim sufficient evidence for the existence of a non-physical chairness?
Or would you consider other explanations for that claim more likely?
Would you change your mind if a lot of people started making that claim?
You misunderstand my position. I don’t think that people’s claims are evidence for anything.
When I invite people to imagine the zombie world, this is not because once they believe that they can do so, this belief (about their imaginative capabilities) is evidence for anything. Rather, it’s the fact that the zombie world is coherently conceivable that is the evidence, and engaging in the appropriate act of imagination is simply a psychological precondition for grasping this evidence.
That’s not to say that whenever you believe that you’ve coherently imagined X, you thereby have the fact that X is coherently conceivable amongst your evidence. For this may not be a fact at all.
(This probably won’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know any epistemology. Basically I’m rejecting the dialectical or “neutral” view of evidence. Two participants in a debate may be unable to agree even about what the evidence is, because sometimes whether something qualifies as evidence or not will depend on which of the contending views is actually correct. Which is to reiterate that the disagreement between me and Lukeprog, say, is about epistemological principles, and not any empirical matter of fact.)
Are you assuming that in order for me to be able to justifiedly believe and reason from the premise that the zombie world is conceivable, I need to be able to give some independent justification for this belief? That way lies global skepticism.
I can tell you that the belief coheres well with my other beliefs, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for my being justified in believing it. There’s no good reason to think that it’s false. (Though again, I don’t mean to suggest that this fact suffices to make it reasonable to believe.) Whether it’s reasonable to believe depends, in part, on facts that cannot be agreed upon within this dialectic: namely, whether there really is any contradiction in the idea.
At the moment, I’m asking you what your reasons are for believing that the zombie world is coherently conceivable; I will defer passing judgment on them until I’m confident that I understand them, as I try to avoid judging things I don’t understand.
So, no, I’m not making that assumption, though I’m not rejecting that assumption either.
Which of your other beliefs cohere better with a belief that the zombie world is coherently conceivable than with a belief that it isn’t?
When I invite people to imagine the zombie world, this is not because once they believe that they can do so, this belief (about their imaginative capabilities) is evidence for anything. Rather, it’s the fact that the zombie world is coherently conceivable that is the evidence, and engaging in the appropriate act of imagination is simply a psychological precondition for grasping this evidence.
If someone were to claim the following, would they be making the same point as you are making?
“The non-psychological fact that ‘SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0’ is a theorem of Peano arithmetic is evidence that 2 added to 2 indeed yields 4. A psychological precondition for grasping this evidence is to go through the process of mentally verifying the steps in a proof of ‘SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0’ within Peano arithmetic.
“This line of inquiry would provide evidence to the verifier that 2+2 = 4. However, properly speaking, the evidence would not be the psychological fact of the occurrence of this mental verification. Rather, the evidence is the logical fact that ‘SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0’ is a theorem of Peano arithmetic.”
Yes, when you make statements about how easy it is to imagine this thing or that thing, you do indeed seem to me to be presenting those statements as evidence of something.
If I’ve misunderstood that, then I’ll drop the subject here.
If you met someone who said with a straight face “Of course I can imagine something that is physically identical to a chair, but lacks the fundamental chairness that chairs in our experience partake of… and is therefore merely a fake chair, although it will pass all our physical tests of being-a-chair nevertheless,” would you consider that claim sufficient evidence for the existence of a non-physical chairness?
Or would you consider other explanations for that claim more likely?
Would you change your mind if a lot of people started making that claim?
You misunderstand my position. I don’t think that people’s claims are evidence for anything.
When I invite people to imagine the zombie world, this is not because once they believe that they can do so, this belief (about their imaginative capabilities) is evidence for anything. Rather, it’s the fact that the zombie world is coherently conceivable that is the evidence, and engaging in the appropriate act of imagination is simply a psychological precondition for grasping this evidence.
That’s not to say that whenever you believe that you’ve coherently imagined X, you thereby have the fact that X is coherently conceivable amongst your evidence. For this may not be a fact at all.
(This probably won’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know any epistemology. Basically I’m rejecting the dialectical or “neutral” view of evidence. Two participants in a debate may be unable to agree even about what the evidence is, because sometimes whether something qualifies as evidence or not will depend on which of the contending views is actually correct. Which is to reiterate that the disagreement between me and Lukeprog, say, is about epistemological principles, and not any empirical matter of fact.)
I agree that your belief that you’ve coherently imagined X does not imply that X is coherently conceivable.
I agree that, if it were a fact that the zombie world were coherently conceivable, that could be evidence of something.
I don’t understand your reasons for believing that the zombie world is coherently conceivable.
Are you assuming that in order for me to be able to justifiedly believe and reason from the premise that the zombie world is conceivable, I need to be able to give some independent justification for this belief? That way lies global skepticism.
I can tell you that the belief coheres well with my other beliefs, which is a necessary but not sufficient condition for my being justified in believing it. There’s no good reason to think that it’s false. (Though again, I don’t mean to suggest that this fact suffices to make it reasonable to believe.) Whether it’s reasonable to believe depends, in part, on facts that cannot be agreed upon within this dialectic: namely, whether there really is any contradiction in the idea.
At the moment, I’m asking you what your reasons are for believing that the zombie world is coherently conceivable; I will defer passing judgment on them until I’m confident that I understand them, as I try to avoid judging things I don’t understand.
So, no, I’m not making that assumption, though I’m not rejecting that assumption either.
Which of your other beliefs cohere better with a belief that the zombie world is coherently conceivable than with a belief that it isn’t?
If someone were to claim the following, would they be making the same point as you are making?
“The non-psychological fact that ‘SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0’ is a theorem of Peano arithmetic is evidence that 2 added to 2 indeed yields 4. A psychological precondition for grasping this evidence is to go through the process of mentally verifying the steps in a proof of ‘SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0’ within Peano arithmetic.
“This line of inquiry would provide evidence to the verifier that 2+2 = 4. However, properly speaking, the evidence would not be the psychological fact of the occurrence of this mental verification. Rather, the evidence is the logical fact that ‘SS0 + SS0 = SSSS0’ is a theorem of Peano arithmetic.”
Yes, when you make statements about how easy it is to imagine this thing or that thing, you do indeed seem to me to be presenting those statements as evidence of something.
If I’ve misunderstood that, then I’ll drop the subject here.
I claim to be wearing blue today.
It’s a restricted quantifier :-)