One has to entirely avoid committing to an argument that features the use of a free-reign imagination process. Unfortunately, it is a historical matter of fact that metaphysics is the discipline in which these kinds of arguments get accepted and are taken as decisive.
The imagination is not limited to the actual world, since we can imagine and conceptualize that some other set of propositions correctly matched-up to the world. But in sober metaphysics, we ought not to judge the limits of the concrete world based upon the limitation (or lack thereof) of our imagination about the world.
Conceivability entails possibility - logical possibility. And it is clear to see that its limits are only where the unthinkable appears. But to think that the world - the concrete world - could be in any way except in the ways it could not be is a simple tautology. So logical possibility and judgments utilizing logical possibility cannot give any informative content about the modality of the world itself. Of course, the concrete world could be only those ways that are not ways it could not be - but this does not tell us what the limits to these ways are or what it is that sets these limits.
There is nothing that is logically possible that depends on the actual world or the concrete world. Nothing has any say on the limits of logic. But the world is not like this. There is something that has a say to the limits of the world - namely, itself.
Logic tells us that once we have limits to modality in the world, we cannot consistently suppose that it overstep its limits. And this is all. And this is trivial and trivially true.
No comments:
Post a Comment