Feiyang Wang

This paper presents a critical examination of various kinds of inconceivability arguments, namely inferences from the inconceivability of a particular claim to its impossibility. Since the word “inconceivability” is ambiguous, I will try to summarize its different senses and give relatively fine-grained definitions of them. Most kinds of inconceivabilities are defective for inconceivability arguments, making the arguments fallacious or dialectically redundant. The only hope consists in what I call “strong positive inconceivability”, which requires that for every situation that one can imagine, one judges that the situation verifies the negation of the relevant claim. However, equipped with this sense of inconceivability, inconceivability arguments are highly limited in application and this might undermine the general philosophical motive for using inconceivability arguments.