Barrel Philosophy:

Agaist logical or metaphysical necessitarainism. Cuz if it’s logical necessitatarianism I will have to pull up some logic stuff. (Basically it’s just arguing agaist Timothy Williamson saying S5 implies necessitarianism.)

The metaphysical one I can present tho.
1. If I can genuinely conceive (conceive of it with all the relevant essential properties) of X then X is possible. (This is the conceivabilty thesis Kripke holds to)
2. I can genuinely conceive of alternate possibilities.
3. So alternate possibilities r possible.

Defense of P1 comes from the contrapositive. If X is not possible, it’s not conceivable. After reflection u can see this is true. U can conceive of a sqaure circle. Additionally, u can’t even conceive of iron floating on water (a metaphysical impossiblity) as if u did you would conceive of the relevent essential properties. Yet this would ential conceiving of the densities. But if one conceived of the essential densities they can see it’s not possible. Instead u conceived of a metallic bar on top of a clear fluid.
Also if I conceive of an object but butcher the relevent essential properties, clearly I’m not actually conceiving of the object. Instead I’m conceiving of some sort of pseudo object.
I can defend this thesis further via 2d semantics but that could take a hot second.

Defense of P2,
I can conceive of 1 more grain of sand existing, or 1 more virtual particle existing.
I understand the essence of a grain of sand, and the relevent (not all, only the relevent ones) essential properties of virtual particles. Knowing this, I can clearly conceive of these scenarios
I think I can offer a more thorough defense of p2 based on the idea of p-zombies, but that will have to wait. Cuz i have hw to do

Jimmy Stephens:

As conceived is stipulatively defined to track essences, the reasons to believe necessitarianism are just going to be reasons to doubt that you’ve successfully conceived of 1 more virtual particle existing.

Maybe you’ve imagined it in a much less existentially robust sense, but you’d have to provide some really strong reasons to think that you’ve actually managed to “conceive” of such a particle as of what “conceive” means in P1.

Otherwise, we’re left with an impasse for your position at best. That being: you say you’ve conceived of real possibilia (“one more particle”) and I say I’ve conceived of actuality as the only possibilia, and there’s no way to decide who’s putative conceiving is the right one.

Barrel Philosophy:

I don’t think it would be coherent to say you’ve conceived of the only possible scenario. Like it’s not even clear what that would mean. U can conceive of a scenario. But it doesn’t seem like u can conceive of actuality being the only possibility. The reason is there’s no essence of only possibility, and there’s no such thing as the only possibility.

U could not conceiving of other possibilities. But I don’t think u could conceive of a state that’s the only possibility, because you plausibly can not conceive of the modal properties of a thing, cuz it won’t change the appearance.

Jimmy Stephens:

Now the question is wether I can truly conceive of the relevant properties of X. Basically, I would appeal to the sand examples, and then argue that even if I can’t conceive of a specific token or type, whatever I do conceive of is possible via 1. When this is combined with the fact that I don’t always conceive of actual thing, we get the fact that this is not the only possible world.

Now It seems I can clearly coherently conceive of a grain of sand. I understand what sand is. I I know it’s relevent properties. And I know that the properties of a heap of sand does not preclude the possibility that there could have been 1 more grain of sand.

Also, whether I can genuinely conceive of some specific token isn’t actually going to disprove that there r other possible worlds. Suppose I conceive of some alien possibilty, but succeed in imaging the exact thing I intended to conceive of. What I have instead conceived of will not be actual, and thus will still show there r more worlds than the actual world.

Spicy:

How do you defend 1?

Barrel Philosophy:

Scroll down and a little and u can see my brief defense. Wether one holds to a descriptivist like Chalmers, or a causal theory of names like Kripke, the argument will still work (indeed Kripke actually holds to this view of conceivabilty’s relation to possibilty.)

The actual reason of explaining why modal breaks occur would take a hot second, but roughly it’s cuz always cuz of aposterioi necesites. And the cause of breakage here is that one can not easily distinguish between the actual thing and an epistemically identical counterpart, that has the same extrinsic appearance and behavior.

Ex. When I imagine the clear watery stuff that fills lakes and rivers I won’t know wether I’m conceiving of h20, or XYZ. So that’s why the break occurs. However. Once we recognize that the break occurs because there could be many different occupants of one role ( a role is the extrinsic appearance or behavior), we can also see that the breaks won’t occur if we just say it’s possible for something to have said role.

Often times this tells us nothing, but many times it will. Ex. It’s possible for a heap to have 1 more grain of sand. Now I can conceive of a role of this additional grain of sand in my mind. It’s possible that it’s not sand however, maybe the thing that has the role of sand isn’t actually sand. However, I will know that it’s possible for the heap to hve 1 additional smth, even if it’s not sand, as the additional smth was filling the role of the scenario in my mind. This implies some alternative is possible, even if it’s not about sand or the heap.
Thus, this sort of method can give u real modal knowledge

Jimmy Stephens:

The reason is there’s no essence of only possibility, and there’s no such thing as the only possibility.

I am not sure whether this matters, but let me see if I understand you first. You are saying the notion of conceiving of actuality (or part of it) as the only possible scenario (or part of it) is incoherent because possibility itself has no essential properties?
In your following paragraph you say something that sounds like an altogether different reason – at least, I cannot make out the connection:

U could not conceiving of other possibilities.

If I understand you, this is trivially true. Yes, on my necessitarianism, you imagine things other than actuality rather than conceive of them. There’s nothing else to conceive of given the stipulation of “conceive” that you have in P1; all human talk of “possibility” is imaginary construction using our conceivings of actuality.

When this is combined with the fact that I don’t always conceive of actual thing, we get the fact that this is not the only possible world.

My original comment was meant to say, in effect, you by definition cannot conceive of a non-actual thing given your definition of conceive. That is all I think P1 effectively accomplishes: stipulating that the word “conceive” now only applies to our imaginative capacities when they grasp essences, which are on necessitarianism always actual, never otherwise.

I get the sense maybe you want to say something else, like that imagination in general is something always aimed at essences plus relevant factors. Then it would be more than a word stipulation going on in P1, because then when we imagine things, there has to be authentic things to imagine with essences independent of actuality.

I don’t believe in any such thing, however, and your argument cannot get us there, as far as I can tell.

Barrel Philosophy:

I’m going to make a through response, but roughly I think u missed the most important point. Namely the distinction between roles and occupants. Where roles r the appearance and external properties, not necessarily the nature. And the occupant is a thing with a nature that occupies some role. So although I may not conceive of the correct occupant, I can conceive of non-actual roles. And if here there r non-actual roles, there must be non-actual occupants of said roles

Jimmy Stephens:

Roles would just be examples used to build or the constructs built from actual nature-classes of occupants, on necessitarianism – at least of my variety.

So it would not follow that because there’s a distinction or because you’ve imagined a role, that you conceived of something non-actual.

On the contrary, you’re feasibly just imagining, not conceiving, but when it’s conceiving, the thing conceived is just some actual law or class of occupants.