possibly maybe

Rough draft. In progress. In what follows, I will explicate what I call ‘the Cartesian Package’.  The Cartesian Package provides the basis for Descartes’ unique account of modal epistemology.  It has two main components: an account of the nature of objects and an account of forming adequate conceptions of them.   Take the former component first.  Given Descartes’ account of homogeneous objects, every object has a structure of properties that are related to one another in a way that’s crucial for his modal epistemology, as we will see.  First, they have a principal attribute, which is the most general and fundamental feature of an object.  This feature is a determinable, and it specifies the kind of object that a thing is, and all of the other sorts of properties that the thing can have.  Descartes, of course, took extension to be the principal attribute of material objects.   Second, objects have other attributes that flow necessarily and transpar...

Fiocco (2007) critiques conceivability-based accounts of modal epistemology, concluding with a brief defense of rational intuition as the source of modal knowledge (cf. Van Cleve, Tidman, and Bealer). The paper can be divided into three main parts.  In the first, Fiocco quickly rehearses standard counterexamples to conceivability as understandability, entertainability, believability, etc. we've seen from, e.g.  Tidman  and  Yablo , concluding with special focus on Tidman's "What Counts?" objection to imagination-based accounts.  The second focuses on Yablo's imagination-based account of conceivability (with limited discussion of Chalmers' account as well). Fiocco argues that while Yablo's account avoids the "What Counts?" objection, it falls prey to a "Which Worlds?" objection (one he attributes to both Yablo and van Inwagen). The core of the objection is that Yablo-style objectually imagined worlds are  purely qualitative  in character...