Danny pointed out to me that we might be pulled to side with Kripke on the intuition that we can imagine heat in a world without creatures to sense the heat; there could still be the motion of molecules in such a world. I think there's more to be said about the identification of fundamentlly sensory properties like heat, but I won't investigate here.
Crucially, the question is can we imagine pain in a world without creatures to sense pain? I'm not sure how much it matters how we answer this question. If we take pain to be a property of nervous systems, which are physical things in the world, isn't asking if we can imagine pain where there're no creatures to sense it just like asking whether or not we can imagine heat in a world with no molecules? If so, Kripke's intuitions might be misleading, or maybe even incoherent. More later, but I'd like to hear thoughts about this...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Mike, I know we just chatted through some of this stuff, but I'm gonna go ahead and type out what I have on paper, even though I think we're agreed that it's easier to think about this in terms of lightning than in terms of heat.
I'm definitely on board with taking pain to be a property of nervous systems, which are physical things in the world. But I don't think that Kripke's intuitions are misleading/incoherent, at least from the point of view of the structure of the argument that he's making. I suspect that part of the reason you think his intuitions may be misleading/incoherent is because you doubt that anything substantive actually follows from his argument [or, perhaps a better way to say this is to question jumping from conceptual to metaphysical, as opposed to jumping from conceptual to epistemological]. Lest I be putting words in your mouth, let me reiterate that I for one am doubtful that anything substantive about the world follows from Kripke's argument. But here's another shot at trying to explain why I think the argument itself works:
It is critical to the argument that we seem to have different intuitions about things that are fundamentally sensory and things that aren't fundamentally sensory- namely, an essential property of fundamentally sensory things is that they be felt by a creature, whereas this is at most a contingent property of things that aren't fundamentally sensory. If this intuition is correct, then asking if we can imagine pain where there are no creatures to sense it is importantly different from asking whether or not we can imagine heat in a world with no molecules [or asking if we can imagine lightning in a world with no electric charges]. The pain question is asking whether pain is fundamentally sensory, but the heat [or lightning] question is not asking whether heat [or lightning] is fundamentally sensory.
Notice the work this does for Kripke's argument: The standard objection to the identity theory was to point out that we can imagine pain existing without that neural state. The standard reply to that objection was to say big fucking deal, this is just another contingent scientific identification. But Kripke argues that the contingency of a true scientific identification x=y is illusory, and must be due instead to the contingent properties of the objects that we use to pick them out.
So let's say we have a true scientific identification that says that x=y, but it seems as though we can imagine x existing without y. If we can imagine x existing without y but it is true that x=y, then the properties of x that we used to pick it out must be contingent, for if they were necessary, and y lacked them, then it would no longer make sense to say that it is true that x=y. Indeed, this is the case with heat, for the sensation of heat isn't an essential property of heat. [Or, with lightning, the shape/form of lightning that it actually has in the sky could have been otherwise, and doesn't appear to be an essential property of lightning.]
The problem that Kripke points out is that we can't explain away the illusion of contingency in the case of identifications involving things that are fundamentally sensory, because if they are fundamentally sensory, this means we have a case where supposedly x=y, yet x possesses an essential property that y lacks. So it would no longer make sense to say that x=y is true.
Post a Comment