Abstract

Swampman is a philosophical creature invented to show that some form of externalism in the philosophy of mind is wrong. Many philosophers seem to take it for granted that swampman's coming into being is conceivable, and therefore metaphysically possible. In this paper I question that very assumption while admitting the significance of the inference from conceivability to possibility. For evolutionarily and naturalistically motivated externalists, I suggest, the best way of responding to the swampman-argument is to deny the metaphysical possibility of the existence of swampman. I show why that is metaphysically impossible from a naturalistic viewpoint.