Modal Empiricism and the Confidence Argument

 Consider the following propositions:

1. My chair can be three feet to the right of my table.

2. There can be naturally purple cows.

3. There can be an alien substance that plays perfectly the watery role.

4. There can be minds without bodies.

5. There can be an Anselmian being.

Does your degree of confidence in the possibility claims listed progressively deflate as you go down the list?  Mine, too. Is your degree of confidence in these claims enhanced by trying to conceive them? Mine, neither. But notice that as we go down the list, the referents of the modal statements progressively decrease in similarity with the actual world and with our knowledge of how the actual world works. Thus, there is a tight correlation between a possibility-candidate’s degree of similarity to the world as we know it, on the one hand, and our degree of confidence in the truth of the candidate’s corresponding modal statement, on the other. 

What accounts for this?  I want to suggest what I take to be a natural explanation: a given possibility statement is justified for a given person just to the extent that it depicts either a token of a type of something in the actual world or something relevantly similar to such a type or token.  For suppose otherwise; suppose our knowledge of possibility were grounded in our conceivings irrespective of whether they depict, or are relevantly similar to, things in the world as we know it. Then we wouldn’t expect there to be such a tight correlation between our degree of confidence in a given possibility claim and the extent to which it resembles, or is grounded in, our knowledge of the actual world. Rather, we would expect it to correlate with our ability to conceive the referent of a given possibility claim, irrespective of its degree of similarity to the actual world. But, at least initially, this doesn’t seem to be so: conceiving the relevant entities makes little or no difference in our confidence in the corresponding possibility claim . Therefore, at least initially, it appears that the tight correlation between our degree of confidence about the truth of a possibility statement and its degree of similarity to the actual world provides at least some evidence that the latter is the source of justification for our beliefs about what is possible. 

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