Try to picture absolute absence (no time, no distance, no substance, nothing at all) and the picturing is already something: the act of conceiving instantiates the very Triconditions it would empty out. The classical ontological argument ran *upward*, from conceivability to a necessary being; this Move runs *downward*, but the load is not the inconceivability itself: it is what inconceivability reveals about ∅'s modal content.

> [!argument]
> **The Conceivability Trap** · *from the inconceivability of ∅ to Triconditional Necessity*
>
> 1. Any attempt to conceive ∅ instantiates T, S, and Φ in the act of conceiving: succession in the attempt, distinction of the represented from the representing, a bearer for the act.
>
> 1. So ∅ cannot be coherently conceived: every representation of it enacts what it denies.
>
> 1. The standard objection to running this further is that conditions of the *act* need not be conditions of the *object*: the back of the moon exists unperceived. That objection has purchase wherever the target is a *something* with content on the far side of the act. **It cannot open for ∅.** To say "∅ obtains, it just cannot be represented" is to posit a determinate obtaining-of-nothing (a state with a bearer, a difference between obtaining and not, a holding). That posit is T ∧ S ∧ Φ on the object side, not merely on the act side. The objection requires a noumenal ∅ (a structured stand-in for the absence of structure), and no such item is available. Nor does the deflationary reading rescue it. Read "∅ obtains" thinly (as the bare failure of every truthmaker, no positive fact and so no bearer) and nothing is claimed to obtain at all, leaving no rival to □(T ∧ S ∧ Φ), only its concession under another name; read it richly enough to name a genuine rival, even an unrepresentable one, and the bearer, the difference between obtaining and not, and the holding return with it. No reading is at once thin enough to escape the bearer and thick enough to name a rival: the point fixed formally at [§2.7.2](<2.7.2 Incoherence of ∅.md>), where to host an obtaining is to sustain a structured state of affairs, and carried by the section's ∅-floor below.
>
> 1. The act-side failure of a representation does not alone show that ∅ lacks object-side modal content. That stronger conclusion rests on the independent Null-State claim that a purported obtaining with no ordering, distinction, or bearer fails to describe a state at all (§[§3.2.1](<3. Convergence.md>), 3.2.6).
>
> 1. The Way–Possibility line ([§3.2.5](<3. Convergence.md>)) adds that any possibility-candidate must at least have determinate content and therefore the difference-role. Direction and bearer require their separately stated premises. The conceivability argument therefore reinforces the structural floor but does not independently derive □(T ∧ S ∧ Φ).

*The two-dimensional diagnosis.* It helps to say in Chalmers's terms exactly which modal status ∅ is being denied. A defender of the empty world will grant that "nothing exists" carries a prima facie *primary* (epistemic) conceivability (it seems, on first reflection, like a coherent epistemic scenario) and will press that this appearance should deliver a *secondary* (metaphysical) possibility. The Move blocks that inference at its first step, not its second. The act/object closure shows that ∅ is not even *ideally* primarily conceivable: any reflection that would confirm the scenario already instantiates succession, distinction, and a bearer, so the apparent empty epistemic possibility dissolves under exactly the ideal reflection primary conceivability requires, leaving only a superficial seeming. Because no primary intension survives, none is available to fix a secondary intension, and the primary-to-secondary bridge two-dimensional analysis was built to govern never receives a candidate to carry. ∅ is therefore not a possibility judged false at some world; it is removed from modal space before the primary/secondary question can be posed (the apparatus is developed at [§4.1.2](<4.1.2 Two-Dimensional Semantics.md>)).

> [!info]
> **Natural worry.** Doesn't the objection just relocate? The conceiving happens here, in a world with the Conditions; what's conceived is a world without them — and conditions of the *act* needn't be conditions of the *object*, the way the far side of the moon exists unperceived. The reply ([§3.3.4](<3. Convergence.md>)) is that this works only where the target is a *something* with content on the far side of the act. It can't open for the empty world: to say "nothing obtains, it just can't be represented" is to posit a determinate obtaining-of-nothing — a bearer, a difference between obtaining and not, a holding — which is time, space, and the medium back on the object side. There is no structured stand-in for the absence of structure for the thought to land on.

*Dependency.* [§1.3](<1.3 Change.md>), [§1.4](<1.4 Three Conditions.md>); the Way–Possibility Convertibility ([§3.2.5](<3. Convergence.md>)) carries step 5; the alethic/doxastic distinction ([§1.1](<1.1 Reality.md>)) carries step 2: the result is a derivation from what ∅ requires of any representation, not a modal intuition, so it survives Oppy-style skepticism about conceivability and the pan-modal-skepticism objection; the modal-epistemic form of that skepticism, which grants ordinary modal knowledge and doubts only remote verdicts, is engaged at [§4.1.13](<4.1.13 Modal Epistemology and the Remoteness Objection.md>). Inconceivability serves as symptom rather than engine: the visible trace of the fact that ∅ has no content for the modal operator to bind. It inverts Findlay, and differs from Pizzi's abstracta-based self-refutation at the load-bearing step, grounding the self-refutation in the *unavailability* of an object-side ∅ that any representation-limit objection would need. The lift from *∅ has no modal content* to the conclusion runs through the section's shared ∅-floor ([§3.2.1](<3. Convergence.md>), [§3.2.6](<3. Convergence.md>)) and the Way–Possibility Convertibility Lemma ([§3.2.5](<3. Convergence.md>)), not the Chapter-2 S5 frame the standalone treatment inherited.


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← [3.3.3 Against Fictionalism](<3.3.3 Against Fictionalism.md>) | [3.3.5 Not Even the Impossible](<3.3.5 Not Even the Impossible.md>) →
