Footstamping for the consistency of imaginative states

((((I was going to post something on reasons and desires, but then the formatting bugged the hell out of me, so I saved the draft and will return to it tomorrow.  instead I’m going to post this draft from May of this year.  I’m not going to attempt to finish it.  I’m just going to post as is.  It’s probably horse shit.  I haven’t even read it.  Weeee!))))>>Occasionally, propositions of the form “ɸ is possible” are philosophically useful.  A common way to argue for such a proposition is:

•  A

1. ɸ is conceivable
2. Therefore, ɸ is possible.

Some people don’t like this argument form.  They want to argue that conceivability does not entail possibility.  In order to get rid of this argument form, the following argument is common.

•  B

1.  ɸ is conceivable.
2. ɸ is impossible.
3. Therefore, “ɸ is conceivable” does not entail “ɸ is possible”.

possibility claims, divorced from corresponding actuality claims, are not dispensible without consequence.  If we can’t have possible states of affairs as a philosophical tool, we in fact have very little to work with in philosophy.  Further, if we don’t have any way of ascertaining possible states of affairs, we don’t have possible states of affairs.  Logical consistency is good…but it doesn’t seem to rule out quite enough.  So how else are we supposed to ascertain possibility without the aid of conceivability?  Answers may be available, but optimisim isn’t exactly warranted. But this is only threatening if some argument of the form (B) with true premises exist.  There are two plausible strategies available.  One is to come up with something conceivable and argue that it is impossible.  Another is to come up with something impossible and argue that it is conceivable.  Arguments of the former sort often appear in terms of the falsity necessary a posteriori statements (that water is H20, or that Samuel Clemens isn’t Mark Twain).  Arguments of the latter sort often appear in terms of visual illusions (e.g. the waterfall illusion). I’ve argued against both strategies in the past (see “On Impossible Imaginings” in the paper page) though my new familiarity with 2D may provide more sophistocated tools with which to recast those arguments.   But here I want to respond to a conversation with a friend of mine, Andy Reagan.  He has accused me of footstamping.  This is not an unjustified charge.  The conversation is not an unfamiliar one: Andy presents an example of a perceptual or intentional state that appears contradictory.  I show him how they need not be understood as contradictory.  Sure, he says, but why take them that way when the people in such states report them as contradictory.  Because, I say, perceptual and intentional states can’t have contradictory content.  Foot stamping, he says. And he’s right.  But one strategy is available to me: To provide an a priori argument for the claim that perceptual states and intentional states cannot have contradictory contents.  I wish to provide as much here, and I will approach it from two directions.  First, I will try to demonstrate it as an analytic truth that perceptual and intentional states must have consistent content.  I will do so in terms of seemings.  Second I will look to some cheap shots that the person in Andy’s position might take, and I will try to defuse them in a way that, I hope will be indicative of the problem with his style of analysis as a whole. First, I should specify that in each perceptual or intentional state to which I might refer, the contents that allegedly contradict one another have to be propositional, contents of the form “that ɸ”.  Non-conceptual contents do not have sufficiently determinate content as to be contradictory with any given state of affiairs, and non-propositional conceptual contents, for instance My perceiving “Andy” only contradicts “not Andy” if it fits into some proposition, taken up under the same attitude (for instance, believing that Andy is the president and either “~Andy is the president” or “Andy is not the president”).  Perceptual contents can only contradict one another if they are sufficiently conceptually structured so as to even determine a state of affairs that could be contradicted.  Now, I’m something of a conceptualist, so I’m happy to say that this is all representational content, but since some may want to talk about non-conceptual representational content, and some may want to talk about non-representational content, I want only to say that neither of these is going to be sufficient to sever conceivability from possibility, since neither could provide the sort of thing that could be impossible, or the sort of pair of things that could be contradictory. Second, perceptual and intentional states that are sufficiently conceptual and propositional so as to even possibly have the sorts of content that could be contradictory or impossible are always going to contain, in some sense, an attitude towards, not only the content in question, but a corresponding attitude towards the negation of the content.  For instance, I cannot believe that P without also believing that not ~P.  But, perhaps, more interestingly, for me to perceive that P always takes a form something like the following:  the way the world is presented to me is the way it would not be if it were not for P.  In this sense, beliefs and perceptions are importantly tied to seemings.  That is, for S to perceive that P is for it to seem to S that ɸ, or for the world to present itself ɸly to S, in a way that it would not seem if it were not the case that P.  Now, if I am right, and to perceive that P is for it to seem a way to me that it would not seem if it were not P, and yet, As Andy suggests is possible, it nonetheless appears to me that ~P, then it appears that the following two things are true:

• It does not seem to me the way it would seem if P.
• It seems to me the way it would not seem if not P.

But the second sentence is equivalent, by the definition of “seeming”, to the sentence “It seems to me the way it would seem if P”.  Now the pair of sentences is: It does not seem to me the way it would seem if P.It does seem to me the way it would seem if P. These contradict eachother, and since both sentences are derivable from a definition of seeming and the proposition “it seems to me as if P and ~P”.This is not question begging.  Question begging would say that “It seems to me that if P and ~P” is impossible without argument.  I am saying that “It seems to me that P and ~P” entails “It seems to me that P” and “It does not seem to me that P”.  Since “It seems to me that P” is a fact about the world, and not just about the way the world seems (it either is or is not the case that it seems to me that P) it cannot be both true and false. The main gist of this argument is as follows:  Seeming is an epistemic relation with a state of affairs, and for it to seem to me that P is for me is a commital state.  It’s not some bare phenomenological receptivity, loosely associated with some state of affairs, but that’s compatible with some other bare phenomenological receptivity that may be contingently latched onto another state of affairs that is in conflict with the first.  This seems to be the spin on seemings that my friend is inclined to take.  But indeed, if this is the relationship between mental states and their content, then it seems obviously the case that contradictory contents are possible; they seem to obtain any time that someone is unsure of something.  Seemings indicate a stronger relationship between phenomenology and epistemology.  For it to seem that P commits you to it seeming a way it would not seem if not P, and this entails its not not seeming the case that p. This has….

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