Summary of Fiocco's "Conceivability, Imagination, and Modal Knowledge": Classic Papers in Modal Epistemology Series

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, and that this makes it virtually impossible to differentiate worlds that verify a modal proposition from those that do not. Fiocco then argues that while one can avoid the "Which Worlds?" objection by deploying the Kripkean method of stipulating what the referents are in a given modal imagining, such a move gives rise to an equally devastating objection: stipulating the referents of an objectually imagined scenario is so promiscuous that it doesn't reliably differentiate between metaphysically possible and metaphysically impossible scenarios. (This point about the epistemic worthlessness of mere stipulation in modal imagining is taken up and developed in detail in the work of Kung).

The third briefly defends an intuitionist account of modal epistemology. One key point made here is that Yablo's own account seems to rely on rational intuition -- in particular, in the component of his account that states that it appears to one that a modal proposition is true. But since (for reasons sketched above) the imaginative component of Yablo's account has been shown to be epistemically worthless, rational intuition is what's doing the epistemic heavy lifting, and the imaginative component plays a mere enabling role in getting one in a position to have a modal intuition.

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