I knew I should have been spending more time web-surfing if I wanted philosophical ideas.

Wo has a post up defending the impossible solution to the puzzle of imaginative resistance. It’s a good post, and I mostly want to just recommend you go read it, assuming like me you’ve been irrationally not checking his page. But I did have four supplementary comments to make.

1. Tyler Doggett pointed out to me that my preferred solution really is a lot closer to the impossible solution than I suggest in the paper. Tyler’s right about this, and I need to correct my existing draft to make it clear that I’m in the same area as the impossible solution. I think my little Quixote story is a pretty powerful argument for something like that solution.

2. There’s an odd asymmetry in the premises I use to argue for my solution. I think my Quixote example is an example of the same kind of phenomenon as the paradigm imaginative resistance cases. But I don’t think the continuity errors that Wo mentions, or the disagreement with reality errors that I mention (e.g. the Conolly Norman example) are the same kind of phenomenon. When I say this is a premise, that’s to say I don’t have an argument for the asymmetry here. I think I probably need one.

3. I’m not really as confident in my judgments about Tamar’s Tower of Goldbach case as I sound in my paper. What I think is most striking is that intelligent people, most prominently now Wo and Tamar, can differ so radically on the case. I’d be more interested in having an explanation of that than actually having a firm judgment about the case. I’ve tried a few ideas for explaining the disagreement, mostly trying to link it to possible disagreements about the metaphysics of mathematics, but nothing is sounding very plausible.

4. After reading Wo’s defense I’m a little more convinced that the impossible solution is compatible with most of the alleged counterexamples (singing snowmen, parentless children, etc) but I still think the science fiction cases, especially the time travel cases, defeat it. It seems to me there are fairly obvious impossibilities in some time travel stories that just don’t matter. These are the hardest cases to explain if you think impossibility is at the heart of imaginative resistance, and I still think they defeat that solution. But maybe I’m being stubborn here.

On this fictional note, happy (belated for some) Bloomsday!

UPDATE: JW pointed out in the comments that the paper on imaginative resistance I keep referring to here isn’t exactly easy to find, since I forgot to add it to my papers page. So I’ll put the link here: Virtuous Resistance.