Berto Francesco, Schoonen Tom
Department of Philosophy, Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC), University of Amsterdam, Oude Turfmarkt 141-147, 1012 GC Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
Synthese. 2018;195(6):2697-2715. doi: 10.1007/s11229-017-1346-7. Epub 2017 Feb 24.
The Humean view that conceivability entails possibility can be criticized via input from cognitive psychology. A mainstream view here has it that there are two candidate codings for mental representations (one of them being, according to some, reducible to the other): the linguistic and the pictorial, the difference between the two consisting in the degree of arbitrariness of the representation relation. If the conceivability of at issue for Humeans involves the having of a linguistic mental representation, then it is easy to show that we can conceive the impossible, for impossibilities can be represented by meaningful bits of language. If the conceivability of amounts to the pictorial imaginability of a situation verifying , then the question is whether the imagination at issue works purely qualitatively, that is, only by phenomenological resemblance with the imagined scenario. If so, the range of situations imaginable in this way is too limited to have a significant role in modal epistemology. If not, imagination will involve some arbitrary labeling component, which turns out to be sufficient for imagining the impossible. And if the relevant imagination is neither linguistic nor pictorial, Humeans will appear to resort to some representational magic, until they come up with a theory of a 'third code' for mental representations.
休谟主义者认为可设想性蕴含可能性的观点，可以通过认知心理学的相关内容进行批判。这里的一种主流观点认为，心理表征有两种候选编码方式（根据一些人的观点，其中一种可归结为另一种）：语言编码和图像编码，两者的区别在于表征关系的任意程度。如果休谟主义者所讨论的可设想性涉及拥有语言性的心理表征，那么很容易表明我们能够设想不可能之事，因为不可能之事可以由有意义的语言片段来表征。如果 的可设想性等同于对证实 的情形的图像化想象，那么问题在于所讨论的想象是否纯粹是质性的，也就是说，仅仅通过与想象场景的现象学相似性来起作用。如果是这样，以这种方式可想象的情形范围过于有限，以至于在模态认识论中无法发挥重要作用。如果不是，想象将涉及一些任意的标记成分，而这被证明足以想象不可能之事。并且，如果相关想象既非语言性的也非图像性的，休谟主义者似乎将诉诸某种表征魔法，直到他们提出一种关于心理表征的“第三种编码”理论。
