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Amos Wollen's avatar

“For example, the modal non-rationalist (or, following Ayn Rand's naming conventions, irrationalist) thinks that there’s no deeper account of why zombies, ghosts, or inverted qualia scenarios are impossible.”

This is not, in fact, what all those who deny a freewheeling modal rationalism think. Many don’t.

O’Connail gives a pretty standard argument here for why the conceivability of zombies doesn’t show that they’re possible. ( https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11098-021-01665-6 ). Why does his argument commit him to the view you ascribe to all mitigated modal skeptics?

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Plasma Bloggin''s avatar

I agree with Premise 1 - I think it's incoherent to say that something is necessary while also saying that there's no reason it's true. I'm a bit apprehensive about the second premise because of Kripke's counterexamples. Before learning of them, I thought modal rationalism was self-evident, and after learning of them, I thought it was false, despite still believing that there must be a PSR for necessary truths. I'm still trying to figure out what I think of the objection given to Kripke's counterexamples. On the one hand, it seems like, "Water is H2O," is itself an proposition that is true in all possible worlds despite not being knowable a priori, and that that fact alone refutes modal rationalism. Which part of this does the objection attack? Is it not a proposition? Is it not necessary? Is it not knowable a priori? Are we conflating two different propositions, one of which is necessary and a priori and the other of which is contingent and a posteriori? Initially, I thought the meaning of, "Water is H2O," could be spelled out explicitly in terms of rigid designations in a way that shows it to be necessary and a posteriori, but it's not so simple - it seems that any way of spelling it out like this either makes it contingent or a priori.

I don't think the refutation of Kripke's counterexamples gives you much ground against a lot of the positions that modal rationalism supposedly refutes, though. Take the impossibility of zombies for example. This seems quite analogous to the impossibility of having water without H2O. It doesn't really matter why it's impossible. If it's impossible to have water without having H2O because, despite knowing fully what the word "water" means, there's still some further modal fact about it that we can't know a priori, then the same could be said of zombies. If it's impossible to have water without having H2O because that's just part of the meaning of the word "water," and we don't know this a priori, then the same could be true of zombies. So even if modal rationalism can be saved from Kripke's counterexamples, it doesn't seem to save certain applications of it.

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