# Contested concept: conceivability

_**What you are reading**: one contested-concept page in Deliberus's deliberation graph. Deliberus maps human reasoning — including claims that are contested, mistaken, or extreme — so that disagreement can be examined precisely. A claim's presence here is not an endorsement: the graph records that someone argued it, how it connects to other reasoning, and how far scrutiny has gotten. The metadata on this page describes the state of that scrutiny, not the truth of the claim._

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- **Contestedness**: criterion
- **Diagnosis**: This is a disagreement over whether intuitions of conceivability have evidential weight about the nature of reality, or only about human psychology.
- **Canonical**: `/concept/conceivability` (data: `/concept/conceivability.json`)

## Senses in use
- **Conceivability arguments are weak, ill-defined or mere intuition** — used in 4 claim(s)
- **Conceivable zombies and inverted spectra show logical possibility and irreducibility** — used in 4 claim(s)
- **Only prima facie conceivable, not ideally conceivable, and so question-begging** — used in 4 claim(s)
- **Inconceivability reveals only how the human mind conceptualizes** — used in 2 claim(s)

## Claims using this term
- [If you have an ill-defined folk psychological umbrella term like "consciousness", then you can pull off all kinds of scenarios and zombie t…](/claim/claim_0be3febf74a8.md) _(sense: Conceivability arguments are weak, ill-defined or mere intuition)_
- [The philosopher Jacy Reese Anthis is of the position that [the hard problem of consciousness] is born of an overreliance on intuition](/claim/claim_0cdf78c6007f.md) _(sense: Conceivability arguments are weak, ill-defined or mere intuition)_
- [The only reason why such thought experiments [the standard anti-physicalist arguments and their anti-dualist reverse versions], both anti-p…](/claim/claim_1ecf862c3d13.md) _(sense: Only prima facie conceivable, not ideally conceivable, and so question-begging)_
- [Conceivability arguments [such as those used in Chalmers' framing of the Hard Problem of Consciousness] are just very, very weak.](/claim/claim_229eb48fd82e.md) _(sense: Conceivability arguments are weak, ill-defined or mere intuition)_
- [Philosophical discussions on the topic of consciousness are a form of "intuition jousting".](/claim/claim_2608cd5b054f.md) _(sense: Conceivability arguments are weak, ill-defined or mere intuition)_
- [Type-B Materialists do accept inconceivability arguments often cited in support of the hard problem [of consciousness].](/claim/claim_27e12507b669.md) _(sense: Inconceivability reveals only how the human mind conceptualizes)_
- [[The logical possibility of philosophical zombies] would imply that facts about experience are not logically entailed by the "physical" fac…](/claim/claim_2cf72085de81.md) _(sense: Conceivable zombies and inverted spectra show logical possibility and irreducibility)_
- [[The conceivability that the relevant behaviours associated with hunger, or any other feeling, could occur even in the absence of that feel…](/claim/claim_596321726a0f.md) _(sense: Conceivable zombies and inverted spectra show logical possibility and irreducibility)_
- [The main arguments for the existence of a hard problem of consciousness (philosophical zombies, Mary's room, and Nagel's bats) are only per…](/claim/claim_897bc6ac2491.md) _(sense: Only prima facie conceivable, not ideally conceivable, and so question-begging)_
- [Inconceivability arguments give us insight only into how the human mind tends to conceptualize the relationship between mind and matter, bu…](/claim/claim_8c33b2108f3d.md) _(sense: Inconceivability reveals only how the human mind conceptualizes)_
- [Chalmers argues that it is conceivable that the relevant behaviours associated with hunger, or any other feeling, could occur even in the a…](/claim/claim_9281de535e84.md) _(sense: Conceivable zombies and inverted spectra show logical possibility and irreducibility)_
- [[On Richard Brown's view,] ideal conceivability involves knowledge of the completed science and thus the ability to deduce *a priori* the d…](/claim/claim_cfa2787ed0c0.md) _(sense: Only prima facie conceivable, not ideally conceivable, and so question-begging)_
- [It is logically possible for a perfect replica of Chalmers to have no experience at all, or for it to have a different set of experiences (…](/claim/claim_ef5610fe2a22.md) _(sense: Conceivable zombies and inverted spectra show logical possibility and irreducibility)_
- [Hence, [the arguments for the existence of a hard problem of consciousness (philosophical zombies, Mary's room, and Nagel's bats)] beg the …](/claim/claim_f4129a818c39.md) _(sense: Only prima facie conceivable, not ideally conceivable, and so question-begging)_