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The main position to be defended and debated in this book — called “the epistemic view” — can be stated by first formulating a hypothesis about our epistemic situation that the author calls “the ignorance hypothesis”, which says that we are ignorant of a type of non-experiential truth relevant to the nature of experience. In the light of this hypothesis, the epistemic view says, first that if the ignorance hypothesis is true, the problem of experience or consciousness is solved, and, second, that the view is true. The reader is also introduced to the example of the slugs and tiles — the main aid to thought in the book.

The problem to be discussed is the logical problem of experience, which focuses on three inconsistent theses: there are experiential truths; if there are experiential truths, every truth is entailed by, or supervenes on, some non-experiential truth; and if there are experiential truths, not every truth is entailed by, or supervenes on, some non-experiential truth. This problem is distinguished from two others: the empirical problem and the traditional mind-body problem.

This chapter discusses the idea that it is mistaken to suppose that there is a genuinely philosophical problem of experience at all. According to one version of the challenge, the problem should be rejected on methodological grounds: it is mistaken to reason from conceivability to possibility at all. It is argued that this reasoning is ubiquitous in philosophy, and thus to the extent that there is a problem here it is everyone’s rather than the author’s. According to another version of the challenge, the problem should be rejected on conceptual grounds: the thesis of physicalism certainly made sense at a particular moment in the history of science, but that moment is long gone and contemporary interpretations of it do not permit the questions typical of philosophy of mind to be legitimately raised. Physicalism and related concepts play an illustrative or inessential role, rather than an essential role, in the logical problem, and once this is appreciated, the basis for skepticism evaporates.

This chapter presents the view that the supervenience of the experiential on the non-experiential is irreducibly a posteriori — the a posteriori entailment view. The main problem for this view emerges when we notice that Kripke, the philosopher who did most to make it prominent, also considered and rejected it. The lesson of Kripke’s discussion on this point is that the mere idea of a posteriori entailment does not solve the problem of experience, and therefore that a proponent of the a posteriori entailment view is obliged to add further material. On the other hand, an examination of what this further material might be yields the result that either the a posteriori entailment view has no answer to the arguments, or else collapses into the epistemic view.

Cartesian modal arguments for property dualism presuppose that facts about the essential natures of pain and other qualitative properties can be grasped a priori by merely conceiving of them or imagining them. This chapter argues that this presupposition fails. It then proposes a theory of metaphysical necessity that in effect reduces it to the subjunctive conditional — to say that it is metaphysically necessary that p, it claims, is equivalent to saying that p would be the case no matter what else was the case. Using this theory of metaphysical necessity as a foundation, the chapter gives an account of how claims concerning metaphysical necessity can be known to be true. This account allows that such claims can, in many cases, be known a priori, but it implies that in many other cases, our grasp of them is a posteriori. The account sustains the criticisms of Cartesian modal arguments offered in the early sections of the chapter.

A meta-conception is a hypothetical one. It answers a question by imagining someone (usually a more able conceiver) answering that question via an act of imagination. Thus, meta-conceptions stand to thought experiments as thought experiments stand to executed experiments. If conceivability entails possibility, then meta-conceiving entails possibility. Meta-conceptions would then work as well as thought experiments. But they do not work as well, giving fresh doubt about ‘Conceivability entails possibility’. Some of what passes for conceiving is really meta-conceiving, so these concerns affect modal epistemology. This chapter considers meta-conceptions as legitimate modes of inquiry but ranks them lower than thought experiments.

This chapter pursues two ideas. The first is that Descartes' argument cannot be faulted simply for relying on an inference from de re conceivability to de re possibility; that inference is implicated in too many de re modal claims routinely accepted without qualm or question. So the standard objection needs refinement: even if some de re conceivability intuitions justify de re modal conclusions, others do not, and when the differences are spelled out, Descartes' argument emerges as unpersuasive. The second idea is that, to the contrary, the more the differences are spelled out, the better Descartes' argument looks.

This chapter analyzes the Textbook Kripkeanism about conceivability and possibility. It argues that Textbook Kripkeanism is not right. The ‘good news’ that E's conceivability ensures its possibility whenever no obfuscating presentation suggests itself is too good to be true.

This chapter explores the role of actuality in modal judgments. It argues that Kripke's first great contribution to conceivability studies was to have seen the need for a technology of modal error detection in the first place. His second great contribution was to have made a start at developing this technology. There is no need to foist on him a third ‘contribution’ of identifying the one and only way modal illusions can arise.

This chapter applies originalism to three further problems: the content of hallucinatory experience, the epistemic role of perception, and arguments against physicalism based on conceivability (especially zombie-based arguments).

Christopher Hill contends that the metaphysical modalities can be reductively explained in terms of the subjunctive conditional and that this reductive explanation yields two tests for determining the metaphysical modality of a proposition. He goes on to argue that his reductive account of the metaphysical modalities in conjunction with his account of modal knowledge underwrites the further conclusion that conceivability does not provide a reliable test for metaphysical possibility. I argue (1) that Hill's reductive explanation of the metaphysical modalities in terms of the subjunctive conditional does not yield a reductive explanation of knowledge of metaphysical modality in terms of knowledge of subjunctive conditionals, and (2) that his account of modal knowledge is at odds with his contention that conceivability does not provide epistemic access to metaphysical possibility.

This chapter is mainly devoted to the conceivability argument against materialism, viewed through the lens of the two-dimensional semantic framework. The key issue is whether conceivability entails metaphysical possibility. The key opponent is the type-B materialist, who denies the entailment. Many objections and putative counterexamples to the conceivability-possibility thesis have been mooted: the chapter discusses fifteen or so putative counterexamples, along with ten or so objections of other sorts to the conceivability argument. It also sketches a positive grounding for the sort of modal rationalism that drives the conceivability argument.

Among Hume's most famous arguments, we find his own version of Malebranche's “no necessary connection” argument: roughly, if x had the power to produce y, it should be impossible to conceive of x without y. But since it is always possible to do this, there cannot be any real (mind‐independent) causal connections. This chapter shows how the argument comes into focus only when seen as an episode in the larger argument from nonsense. Although the conception of causation as logical necessitation, which forms the target of Hume's argument, has its source in the scholastics, it lives on in the cognitive and geometrical models. The chapter shows just how Hume's argument applies to these models and points toward Hume's own subjective account of necessity as the felt determination of the mind to form one perception on the basis of another.

The definition of zombies is clarified, and the main arguments for the alleged possibility of zombies are examined. The ‘conceivability argument’ is influential: zombies are conceivable; whatever is conceivable is possible; therefore zombies are possible. Chalmers’s arguments for conceivability are given special attention, notably his use of Block’s homunculus-head; the apparent gap between physical information and facts about experiences; Jackson’s ‘knowledge argument’; and the argument from the ‘absence of analysis’. It is argued that none of the arguments is conclusive.

Why do we tend to ascribe possibility to what we can imagine? One strategy for answering that question involves the thought that, just as sensory episodes often involve its seeming to us as though the world is certain ways, so imaginings involve its seeming to us that what we have imagined is possible. This chapter argues that while some imaginings do feature appearances of possibility, very many others do not; and it explores the broader relevance of its conclusions for modal epistemology.

This chapter argues that claims of possibility and necessity are equivalent to claims involving counterfactual conditionals, and uses the equivalences to derive basic principles of modal logic within the logic of counterfactuals. The derivations employ weaker assumptions than corresponding derivations by Lewis and Stalnaker. They still use the principle that all counterpossibles (counterfactual conditionals with impossible antecedents) are vacuously true, but this principle is defended. The account is extended to quantified modal logic; de re modalities are equivalent to de re counterfactuals, which are usually considered unproblematic. An application is suggested to the epistemology of modality: the role of conceivability and inconceivability in the evaluation of claims of possibility and impossibility, rather than being regarded as problematically sui generic, should be treated as a special case of the role of the imagination in the evaluation of counterfactual conditionals, which is commonplace even for mundane, highly contingent counterfactuals.