Kung's Modal Epistemology

 Peter Kung offers the most sophisticated version of imagination-based modal epistemology to date. His account is grounded in an account of the nature of sensory imagination that’s informed by recent work on the subject in philosophy and the sciences. The core idea is that sensory imaginings have two kinds of content: qualitative and assigned. Qualitative content consists in mental imagery, which represents a distribution of objects and their qualities in three-dimensional egocentric space.  By contrast, assigned content consists in the labels and descriptions we assign to the objects and properties represented by the sensory content of imagination. According to Kung, the two components of imaginative content differ markedly in terms of the ways in which they can confer justification on a possibility claim. The qualitative content of an imagining can indicate what’s metaphysically possible in virtue of demonstrating a consistent way of “filling in” three-dimensional space. 

By contrast, assigned content is evidentially worthless on its own. This is because assigned content is virtually unconstrained, as the only things we can’t imagine via pure assigned content are things we can rule out for certain as necessarily false. As such, assigned content allows us to easily and frequently imagine the impossible (e.g., time travel, descriptions of states of affairs that fall crosswise of origin essentialism and a posteriori necessities, etc.). Furthermore, assignments are mere stipulations, and since mere stipulations aren’t evidence for anything, they’re not evidence for what’s metaphysically possible. Therefore, mere assigned content can’t contribute the justification of a possibility claim. 

Given this sketch of the nature of imagination and its contents, we are in a position to grasp the core of Kung’s account of modal epistemology in fairly intuitive terms: An occurrent episode E of sensory imagining can justify a claim that P is metaphysically possible just in case the qualitative content in E depicts a scenario in which it is intuitive that P is the case, and any and all assigned content in E is authenticated via knowledge of what is actually the case or via what can be qualitatively imagined without the aid of (unauthenticated) assigned content. 


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