Possibilities in Philosophy of Mind Charles Taliaferro Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 57, No. 1. (Mar., 1997), pp. 127-137. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8205%28199703%2957%3A1%3C127%3APIPOM%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society.
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Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. LVII, No. 1, March 1997
Possibilities in Philosophy of Mind CHARLES TALIAFERRO
St. Olaf College
This paper seeks to overturn the claim that Cartesian arguments for dualism based on the conceivable separation of person and body lack warrant, since it is just as conceivable that persons are identical with their bodies as it is that persons and their bodies are distinct. If the thesis of the paper is cogent, then it is not as easy to imagine person-body identity as many anti-Cartesians suppose.
I can exist without my body, either by switching to a new one or by existing disembodied tout court. My body cannot switch to another body, nor can it exist in some sort of disembodied state. Because there is something true of me, not true of my body, it follows that I am not my body. Variations of this familiar, Cartesian reasoning have been employed in arguments for Person-body dualism, the merits and demerits of which have been much discussed. A sampling of the issues involved includes whether the argument is question-begging, whether the notion of personal disembodiment is conceptually coherent, whether compositional theories of the self are able to be physicalist and yet permit disembodiment and body switching, and whether the argument stumbles on a confusion of de re and de dicto reference, misuses Leibniz' law or it rests on confusing attributions to an individual in this world with attributions to counterparts in other possible worlds.' The focus of this paper is an objection that strikes at the very roots of the modal argument, matching Cartesian and anti-Cartesian intuitions. Even if all the above objections to the dualist argument can be met, it still faces the objection that a materialist scheme of person-body identity seems just as plausible a candidate for being a genuine, metaphysical possibility as the ostensible Cartesian possibilia of personal disembodiment and radical body switching. Michael Hooker, Richard Boyd, Michael Tye, and Dean Zimmerman have I address some of these matters in "A Modal Argument for Dualism", Southern Journal of Philosophy, vol. 24, no.1, 1986, pp. 95-108, "Nagel's Vista or Taking Subjectivity Seriously", Ibid., vol. 26, no. 6, 1988, pp. 393-401, and "Pollock's Body Switching", Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 36, no. 4, January 1986, pp. 57-61. Other current, sympathetic accounts of dualism include Richard Swinburne's The Evolution of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986) and The Immaterial Self by John Foster (London: Routledge, 1991). POSSIBILITIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
127
each challenged the Cartesian with what are claimed to be equally plausible anti-Cartesian judgment^.^ Are Cartesian modal judgments equally matched with anti-Cartesian ones? It is not clear that they are. In order to properly focus on the objection at hand, let us concede what some, more radical skeptics will not, namely that Cartesian thought experiments of disembodiment possess initial plausibility and that if they are indeed bona$de possibilities as opposed to merely ostensible ones, then a dualism of person and body is warranted. Dualism is not vindicated, however, because of the ready availability of anti-Cartesian thought experiments. Dean Zimmerman's statement of the objection is representative. He develops the objection in opposition to Richard Swinburne who argues for dualism on the basis of disembodiment thought experiment^.^ Zimmerman responds to Swinburne as follows: "It is conceivable.. .that I be identical with my body, or some part of it-this is a state of affairs which I can imagine easily enough, and with as much clarity and detail as Swinburne's favored alternat i ~ e " In . ~his view, this suffices to drain the Cartesian argument of its force, because conceiving of Person-body identity seems to be no less detailed, clear or easy to conceive, than to conceive of the possibility of his disembodiment. Based on the assumption that a nonphysical thing cannot become physical, he holds that the bare possibility of him being physical conflicts with the assertion that it is possible for him to exist disembodied. Zimmerman's quarrel with Cartesians is not that disembodiment seems patently absurd, nor that dualism rests on a scientifically inadequate understanding of causal relations, nor (for reasons Colin McGinn has been promoting) that disembodiment thought experiments will invariably fail to capture the essential link between the mental and physical. Rather, he, along with Tye and others, is concerned to show that the Cartesian appeal to thought experiments is of no worth because the thought experiments can cut the other way with equal force. If the denial and the affirmation of the possibility of our existing disembodied are equally plausible, then the Cartesian argument is indeed without a great deal of force. One might well argue that under conditions when conflicting modal intuitions are equally matched, then accepting either is warranted. This would enable the dualist to contend that her viewpoint is not intellectually irresponsible, but of course it would also leave the nondualist in - -
-
-
Cf. Michael Hooker, "Descartes' Denial of Mind-Body Identity" in Descartes, Critical
and Interpretive Essays (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1978), pp. 180, 181; Richard
Boyd, "Materialism Without Reductionism" in Readings in Philosophy of Psychology,
edited by Ned Block (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), vol. 1, pp. 84, 85;
Michael Tye, "On the Possibility of Disembodied Existence", Australasian Journal of
Philosophy, vol. 61, no. 3, September 1983, p. 280; Dean Zimmerman, "Two Cartesian
Arguments for the Simplicity of the Soul", American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 28, no.
3, July 1991.
Swinburne, The Evolution ofthe Soul.
Zimmerman, p. 222.
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CHARLES TALIAFERRO
an equally warranted position. Weaker versions of the modal argument may be explored elsewhere, though here the concern is with whether there is a parity between the Cartesian and identity modal thought experiments that forces the dualist to such weaker terrain. As Zimmerman's development of the parity thesis is the most recent, and among the clearest, let us address his version of it more fully. First note that Zimmerman's objection is not simply that personal disembodiment seems both metaphysically possible and metaphysically impossible, but that Person-body identity seems metaphysically possible and that that possibility entails Person-body disembodiment is metaphysically impossible. The reason for discounting the Cartesian-Swinburnian scenario of disembodiment is thereby derived from what Zimmerman claims to be the apparent possibility that he is identical with his body. If a state of affairs is possible then those states of affairs entailed by it are possible, and, hence, if it is possible that he is identical with his body, then it follows that it is not possible he can exist disembodied. But how easy is it to imagine that you are identical with your body? Off hand, it seems easy enough. The way to think of yourself as identical with your body is simply to assume that when you gaze at your body, you are gazing at yourself. The sciences allow for close inspection of the brain, and you might imagine that as you scan your brain you are scanning yourself or some part of yourself. You may also think of yourself as walking, talking, gesturing, and such, while all along assuming that you-as-that-body are carrying out these activities. It is not clear, however, whether this is enough. For the dualist who embraces a robust understanding of the interaction between person and body, the cases you are imagining do not suffice to secure thinking of Person-body identity as distinct from Person-body dualism. Dualistic interactionism is fairly unexceptional in its account of what makes a given body one's own. There are a cluster of tight, causal interactions linking person and body such that the person's consciousness depends on the functioning of the person's brain, the person has immediate sensory awareness of his bodily skin and perhaps some internal parts as well (e.g. stomach aches), the person uses the bodily sensory organs by seeing with his eyes, smelling with his nose, hearing with his ears, feeling with his skin; the person moves about the world as fully embodied, functioning as a body in the world. Of course, there are cases of bodily impairment, as with blindness and the like, which are not absolutely essential for one to avoid in order to retain possession of one's body. Moreover, the above list is not intended to be exhaustive. Some philosophers (not just dualists) wish to underscore the additional perceptual feature of propriaception enabling a person to be sensorily aware of the location of their various bodily parts which is crucial for bodily possession. Cases in which a
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subject simply knows where his legs are without looking at them have been called instances of knowledge without observation (Anscombe). But however these psycho-physical relations are worked out in detail, the dualist will want to insist that in most moral, legal, aesthetic, scientific, and everyday contexts, a person is not to be treated as distinct from his or her body. Your touching someone's hand or operating on their brain or watching them run or listening to their speech will all be seen by the dualist as instances of touching a person, operating surgically on him, watching him run, and hearing him talk. The dualist will assume that in ordinary contexts it is quite proper to think of gazing at someone's body as a case of gazing at him or her.5 "I protest", a critic may respond. "When I imagine myself to be identical with my body I assume that there is no more to me than my body. The dualist imports an additional item into the story. If he thinks that to gaze at his body is to gaze at himself, this is only due to an analysis that he imports to the case at hand. In a dualistic schema, a given body is his in a derived fashion. It is derived from the cluster of causal relations you note which all involve a nonphysical being and nonphysical-to-physical relations, whereas my conceiving of myself as identical with my body does not involve imagining that any such things are going on at all." Indeed, the dualist's claim that to see a person's body is to see the person who is embodied is one that is based on the supposition that there are many relations involving the person construed as a nonphysical being. But worries about the ease of imagining Person-body identity concern how one is clearly to differentiate cases in which one is indeed identical with one's body (in some strict sense as posited by the identity theory) from cases in which one is causally embodied (as the Person-body dualist would construe it) enabling us to treat the person and body as a single individual in most circumstances. In other words, how do we distinguish conceiving of a person who is to be regarded as identical with his body in virtue of the dualist causal relations, from a case of conceiving of a person who is to be regarded as identical with his body in virtue of the metaphysical identity of person and body? To the dualist, the above critic seems committed to thinking of Person-body identity in a fashion that leans too heavily on the notion of imagining an absence. Dualists will read the identity thought experiment (wherein a person imagines their being identical with their body) as a case of imagining the absence of the person as a nonphysical being and the consequent absence of the various Swinburne provides an interactionist account of the Person-body relation that would vindicate this point of view. Many critics tend to exaggerate the splintered character of dualist accounts of personal identity. Witness, for example, Ilham Dilman's Matter and Mind (London: MacMillan, 1975) or, famously, Gilbert Ryle's work. I seek to articulate an integrated, dualist account of person and body in Consciousness and the Mind of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
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physical-nonphysical relations. But how are we to envision the absence of a nonphysical person and certain relations which, if they were present, would not seem to leave any evident marks like causing one's face to look different or causing one to slur speech or otherwise to alter one's sensory experience? I can form a clear picture of a person without one arm,because the presence of the arm would make a detectable difference, but how does the identity theorist secure his thought experiment as truly excluding a dualist reading? "I protest again", the critic rejoins. "If we adopt your requirements for successful thought experiments we will not be able to succeed in the simplest cases. Surely I can conceive of a room with only one person in it despite the fact that what I am imagining, Peter slumped down in his chair, is compatible with there being a tiny elf hiding under the chair in the room with him. Your mistake lies in collapsing the difference between 'conceiving' and 'picturing'. Obviously, I run into difficulties with picturing the absence of a person qua nonphysical being in the sense of forming a positive, vivid picture of what the absence looks like. Absences are not concrete individual things to be seen. But this does not mean that I cannot conceive of the absence of a nonphysical being when I entertain an anti-Cartesian thought experiment. I do, after all, conceive of there being a concrete, physical person present who is a positively conceived, physical body." Conceiving and picturing can be quite different and we should be wary about insisting that an essential condition for the success of a thought experiment is that what is conceived of must exclude all incompatible readings. 'Success' is measured differently depending upon one's aims and if we are trying to conceive or picture a room with only one person in it we need not worry about elves. Still, when our aim is to follow up on the materialist's proposal that we can easily conceive of Person-body identity as opposed to Person-body dualism, then it seems perfectly legitimate to ask how the difference between them would be manifested in the thought experiment. And if we concede that there is no way in which the pictures (or scenes as we would see them, or scenes that we do see) differ, shouldn't we wonder how they differ except by fiat or bare stipulation? Once it is conceded that dualism has some initial credibility (if only that it cannot be ruled out as conceptually absurd from the outset), it is very difficult to be sure we can conceive of ourselves as being identical with our bodies in line with the identity theory in a way that excludes dualism. Conceiving of one's origin as a body does not seem to secure the desired conception, any more than conceiving of one's not having an afterlife, for neither pre-natal existence nor personal afterlife are entailed by the truth of dualism. While some dualists believe in an afterlife, some are agnostic (C. J. Ducasse) and others skeptical (C. D. Broad and C. Lamont). So, conceiving of your being identical with your body would not be secured by
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conceiving that you only come into being when your body does, nor by conceiving of your coming to an end when your body doesS6 Critic: "So how do you conceive of yourself as the dualist would like to, as opposed to the way a strict Person-body identity theorist would? The tables can be turned here. If it makes little detectable difference between how one thinks of each option, doesn't that make the dualist view look more precarious? After all, it 1s the more complex of the two, the identity theorist only posits one individual while the dualist posits two, even if the Person-body relationship is thought to be so integral that an embodied nonphysical person would be impossible to pick out of a crowd of other persons who are identical with their bodies." A way to make evident the difference between conceiving of oneself as the dualist does as opposed to the strict identity theorist, is to consider the further question of whether it is possible for persons to become disembodied or switch bodies. Our never undergoing such changes is compatible with dualism, but the possibility of such undergoings is plausibly held to be incompatible with the identity thesis. In order to secure thinking of oneself as nonphysical yet embodied vis-a-vis oneself as strictly identical with a body, one needs a thought experiment like the one noted at the outset of this paper. For me to conceive of myself as metaphysically distinguishable from my body is for me to conceive of the possibility of my existing independent of my body or the possibility of my switching bodies. This is in line with Descartes who took the capability of independent existence to be a mark of what it is to be a s~bstance.~ Consider an analogy with phenomenalism versus representational realism. How does one distinguish conceiving of a phenomenalist world from conceiving one in which representational realism is true? To distinguish the two one must do more than focus on the content of one's experience of shapes, textures, colors (which, ex hypothesi, would be indistinguishable), and focus on a deeper, underlying terrain; e.g. can one conceive of an external world not composed of sense-experience, capable of existing independent of any such experience? Likewise, to grasp a dualist as distinct from a Person-body identity state of affairs one must consider certain modal propositions.
I am not denying here the Kripkean notion of the essentiality of origin. I am pressing the point that it is difficult to imagine the origin of the person as a physical being as distinct from imagining the origin of a person as nonphysical, yet physically embodied. Descartes insists that "Two substances are said to be really distinct, when each of them can exist apart from the other". The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. by E. Haldane and G . R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), volume I, pp. 32, 33. For a recent defense of this stand, the use of thought experiments, and an advocacy of dualism see W. D. Hart's The Engines of the Soul (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). In Consciousness and the Mind of God I provide a further defense of dualist thought experiments.
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One resource dualists sometimes use in support of their modal intuitions is the wide spread reporting of out-of-the-body experiences (henceforth OBEs, as is customary in the literature). A case for taking OBEs seriously in philosophy of mind is developed e l s e ~ h e r e Here . ~ it will only be possible to raise some objections to Zimmerman's treatment of them. Over against the dualist appeal to OBEs, Zimmerman writes: A story about my seeing my body disappear below me as I drift through the ceiling of my hospital room has much more charm and appeal than a story about my tallying up all of my parts and finding only hunks of matter on the list. But does the greater degree of attractiveness or 'luminosity' associated with the disembodiment story suggest that I am better able to form a distinct conception of the state of affairs it describes ...? The conceivability of disembodiedseeming experience, however, is not at issue, but rather the conceivability of my becoming disembodied. The experiences described as accompanying disembodiment are entirely irrelevant to this question. After all, someone else could have the experience of seeming to remember events in my life, seeming to see my body fall away, and so on, without having been me. Or I might survive as a disembodied amnesiac or perpetual dreamer who never has conscious recollection of events in my embodied life. To really assess the conceivability of my disembodiment, I must focus on this state of affairs itself, and not be distracted by the ease with which I can imagine disembodied-seeming e ~ ~ e r i e n c e s . ~
Zimmerman's is right that the latter two states of affairs are distinct, but it is unclear as to why that would lead him or anyone to dismiss the dualist appeal to OBEs. There is a difference between a person's being disembodied and a person's experiencing himself as disembodied, as well as a difference between someone having an OBE accompanied by a veridical grasp of his personal identity and having an OBE with only a confused sense of who he is. One can, of course, take precautions against such confusion by focusing on thought experiments which involve the subject's surviving bodily dissolution in such a way that he is psychologically intact. Zimmerman does not press the point that all disembodiment would involve psychological mayhem, and it should be noted that even if it is conceded that a person can survive the demise of his body only as an amnesiac or in a state of confusion about his past, that still seems to play into the dualist's corner (given what Zimmerman concedes otherwise). Apparently, Zimmerman is not advancing the point that modal intuitions themselves are defeasible. He makes no claim that his modal hunch about In Consciousness and the Mind of God I also seek to reply to work by Thomas Nagel,
Colin McGinn and others who discount the evidential role of OBE thought experiments.
Reports of OBEs are remarkably detailed and vivid. See S. J. Blackmore's contribution,
'Out-of-the-Body Experience', in The Oxford Companion to the Mind-(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1987) and the references to other literature offered there. Some
nondualists are prepared to give philosophical significance to the plausibility of imagining
disembodiment. See my discussion of work by Armstrong, Boyd, Pollock, and D. Lewis in
"A Modal Argument for Dualism", up cit.
Zimmerman, p. 223.
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Person-body strict identity is infallible or absolutely certain. If he is not contesting the thesis that in the absence of defeaters, a proposition representing a state of affairs which seems to be possible is some reason to believe it is possible, what is his chief objection?1° Zimmerman's principal worry is that the dualist appeal to thought experiments like OBEs rests on a crippling assumption. He writes: The supposition that I become disembodied is equivalent to the supposition that I now have a non-physical part interacting with my body which comes to have psychological properties 'all by itself after my body is destroyed. The aura of attractiveness surrounding my conception of this complex state of affairs is much weaker than that surrounding my imagination of an experience that feels like 'leaving my body'. And it is the degree of conceivability of the former, and not the latter, which is to be compared with the conceivability of my being identical with some physical thing.''
This seems wrong. Two minor caveats are noted only to set them aside in order to focus on more important terrain. The first, meager point is that some dualists will not treat the two states of affairs 'I can exist disembodied' and 'I have a non-physical part interacting with my body' as equivalent because they are occasionalists and will not accept the latter without a considerable metaphysical gloss. Second, a dualist may balk at whether his view is put most perspicuously as amounting to his having a nonphysical part interacting with his body. Some dualists prefer stating that they as persons are nonphysical yet physically embodied in a way that is quite different from thinking of the person as containing or having a nonphysical part.12 A third, more substantial reservation concerns the claim of equivalence. For ease of reference, let 'A' stand for the Cartesian-style proposition representing the state of affairs 'I can exist disembodied', and 'B' for 'I am not my body', where this is understood as my not being identical with my body as a whole nor any bodily part of it. A and B are logically equivalent in that they both must have the same truth value, but this does not mean that A and B are identical propositions, nor that we are equally well placed to assess their respective modal status. A proposition is not identical with all the propositions it entails, and it is equally clear that propositions with the same truth value are not all identical. Necessarily true propositions must have the same truth values, for example, but obviously they are not all identical. While it is true that if A is possible then all states of affairs entailed by A are possible, we are rather badly off if, in order to consider whether any state of affairs is -
lo
l' l2
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I further articulate the conditions under which we are warranted to accept modal judgments in "A Modal Argument for Dualism". Zirnmerman, p. 223. In Consciousness and the Mind of God I seek to articulate an integral form of dualism which avoids such an outcome. CHARLES TALIAFERRO
possible, we need to consider with respect to each state of affairs entailed by it, whether it is possible. Any state of affairs entails indefinitely many states of affairs. The difference between A and B is manifested both in the fact that it is in virtue of B, that A is possible, and that one can conceive of A without conceiving of B. In support of the latter, note that many cases of OBEs which are reported by nonphilosophers come to us without the subjects working out any of the metaphysical entailments of their views. The difference between A and B is also manifested by B's being easier for many of us to grasp than A, a fact that Zimmerman seems to countenance as he signals that A has initial plausibility, while he seems dour about conceding whether B has any .I3 Zimmerman is anxious to match his proposed counter-claim of being identical with his body with B and A together, or just with B. Let's label his Person-body claim 'I am identical with my body' as 'C'. The problem with matching C with B, however, is that it is very difficult to distinguish these two cases clearly for the reasons laid out above. How does one differentiate a case in which Zimmerman is identical with his body versus a case in which he is nonphysical, yet dualistically embodied? In order to make evident that we are thinking of a case like C and not B, we have to see it as amounting to the entailment that A is not possible. C is under-described until it is treated as entailing the denial of A and B. By way of contrast, we do not need to know about C or B in order to grasp A. In the modal argument for dualism, it follows from our having reason to think A is possible, that we have reason to think C is false and B is true. One need not settle in advance the superior status of C or B before considering A. The direction of argument is crucial to recognize here, because, after all, Zimmerman's argument is that C is as easily and clearly imaginable as the claim that A is possible. Critic: "Let me try a last time. An analogy may be useful. In order to know that this page is this page, must I grasp that it could not exist without itself? The absurdity of answering 'yes', brings out the absurdity of the constraints you propose that the Person-body identity theorist must labor under. In accord with the theory I adopt, the terms 'person' and 'body' pick out the very same individual. Surely I do not need to see my claim C, 'I am my body', as amounting to the denial of A, that 'I can exist disembodied'. After all, in my view, it is in virtue of C, that A is not possible, not vice versa." C is distinct from the denial of A, but why should this prompt one to withdraw the earlier claims about the difficulty of identifying C in a way that is clearly demarcated from B without seeing that the former entails that A is impossible? The page case needs adjusting to bring out the point at issue. There is no reasonable doubt that what we identify as this page is this page, though one may alter the case somewhat to bring it more in line with the dul3
In "A Modal Argument for Dualism" further reasons are offered for this stance. POSSIBILITIES IN PHILOSOPHY OF MIND
135
alist thesis. Consider the question of whether 'this page'--construed ostensively as designating the specific material object in front of us-is 'this page' in which the latter designates something which various philosophers have been disposed to think is distinct, for example: the page as it appears to one in sensory experience or a page time-slice or the proper parts of the page as distinct from the page as a whole. In the philosophy of mind dispute here, we are engaging an interlocutor who does not think Person-body dualism is obviously wrong from the outset. Many of us consider it very difficult to work up sympathy for denying this page is this page. But if one did concede that denying the identity claim was not obvious nonsense, perhaps for the reasons suggested, then the cases of pages and Person-bodies may be more analogous than is apparent at first.I4 The purpose of this paper has been a narrow one, and, taken by itself, it in no way provides a full vindication of dualism. Many of the reasons have not been weighed which are popularly appealed to in arguing that dualism is conceptually absurd quite apart from any weaknesses in the modal argument. To highlight the positive contribution of this paper to weighing possibilities in philosophy of mind, consider the following scenario about how the apparent possibility of A can have an independent role in providing reasons for embracing B. Imagine you share with Zimmerman and others the view that physical things cannot become disembodied, dualism has initial plausibility, and the modal argument given at the outset of this paper is at least valid. Unlike Zimmerman, however, you are not sure whether C is possible or B is possible. You try to picture your body as yourself (or yourself as your body) and yet you are not certain that you have succeeded in picturing a state of affairs that is clearly distinguishable from a state of affairs in which you are an embodied, nonphysical being. For all you know, C is possible, but then, for all you know, that judgment could be wrong and actually it is B that is possible. l4
I want to underscore that I nowhere claim to have established that the conceivability of Person-body identity is always parasitic on, or a comparatively second class modal citizen, to that of dualism on the basis that to conceive of the identity of person and body involves thinking that it is not possible that I can exist disembodied, whereas to conceive of my existence as disembodied it is not necessary to entertain the proposition that I cannot be identical with my body. What I have held instead is that if you allow that dualism has initial credibility, then to form a clear distinction between conceiving (or imagining or picturing, whatever) of Person-body identity versus a dualistically embodied person, then dualism does have the edge I have sought to identify. I seek to clarify the role that the respective modal intuitions have in the final paragraph. Consider one reader's objection. "The claim that there is a conceivable difference between being identical with one's body on the one hand and being an embodied but nonphysical mind on the other only if we can picture a difference between the two is very questionable. Such a claim would rule out as unintelligible the difference between materialism on the one hand and the epiphenomenalist or double aspect position on the other, since neither of the latter countenances an imaginable separation of mind and body."
136 CHARLES TALIAFERRO
You then consider the possibility of your becoming disembodied. Such a state of affairs seems to you to be possible. You can, for example, form a vivid, detailed picture of such an occurrence along the lines of many reported OBEs. You know of no reason, metaphysical or otherwise, to doubt that imagining yourself disembodied is imagining something which is a bonajide possibility. Under these conditions, the plausible embracing of A as possible would give you reason for believing that B is true and that C is false.15
l5
Thanks to M. Nelson, R. Swinburne, J. Foster, A. Avrimedes, D. Homer, T. Chappell, N. Rescher, and an anonymous PPR reviewer.
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Pollock's Body-Switching Charles Taliaferro The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 36, No. 142. (Jan., 1986), pp. 57-61. Stable URL: http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0031-8094%28198601%2936%3A142%3C57%3APB%3E2.0.CO%3B2-G
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