sorry, here's the link i think

http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~lds/pdfs/Shtulman_Carey-Improbable_or_impossible-ChildDev2007.pdf

Kripke lightning

So, we have our doubts about the metaphysical implications of Kripke's argument. And much philosophical ink has been spilled arguing about conceivability and possibility. With that in mind, I came across a recent Susan Carey article entitled "Improbable or Impossible: How children reason about the possibility of extraordinary events". According to the abstract, children and adult were asked whether a bunch of weird events could or could not occur in real life. For example, just to give you an idea of some of the events they're talking about, 100% of the 4-year olds said that drinking onion juice was improbable but not impossible (yes, one has to read the method section closely to see how they could interpret the results in this manner), whereas only 8% of the 4-year olds thought that growing money on a tree, or turning applesauce back into an apple, was likewise improbable but not impossible.
Also, thinking about the lightning example from Place, here are some cool stats from the 4 year olds: 58% think that getting struck by lightning is improbable but not impossible, and 42% think that eating lightning for dinner [yes, a picture is included] is improbable but still possible.
Oh, the conclusion in the article (well, the abstract, haven't read the article) is that children generally are stricter with impossibility attributions than adults are. "Children intitially mistake their inability to imagine circumstances that would allow an event to occur for evidence that no such circumstances exist."
I'm guessing that this will ultimately have more philosophical significance for concepts, and conceptual development, than stuff pertaining to Kripke's modal intuitions, but who knows. Susan Carey is really at the top of the game in terms of philosophically-relevant psychology.
I'm also guessing that they didn't ask the subjects to imagine pain without the sensation of pain, but probably some experimental philosophers have jumped all over that one.

Mind-Brain Identity (continued)

Here is a consideration from Rorty regarding what he takes to be a central confusion in Neo-dualist proposals about phenomenal properties (see Phil and the Mirror of Nature, Chpt. 1, Sect. 2). I'll lay out the reasoning roughly here:

Neo-Dualism (ND): Pains are individuated/identified by the way they feel, so the causal role of neurons in the instantiation of pain is not essential to what pain is (we can have Martian pain and Ghost pain, ETC.?). What counts as a pain is any particular occurrence of a particular kind of phenomenal feel. Material constitution is nothing essential; so, pain cannot be identified with neural states.

Rorty's Counter-Consideration: ND's Hypostatization of Pain

Hypostatization: Taking a quality/property and transforming it into a subject of predication.

Pain Hypostatized: PAIN is taken from being considered a property of persons and conceived of as a particular, elligible for predication in its own right. But...

1. ND PAIN is PAINFULNESS, the feeling of pain, or the universal or concept of what it's like to be in pain, abstracted from particular instances of pain.
2. Confusion: ND PAIN is a universal construed as a particular. A particular pain state is just an acknowledged instance of a universal: PAINFULNESS.
3. What appears to be an ontological distinction is merely a confused instance of the particular/universal distinction; paradoxically, mental particulars (pains) are like universals.

The upshot, according to Rorty, is that early Identity Theorists and Neo-Dualists are talking past each other:

• Smart/Place are talking about what is essential to someone's being in pain.
• Neo-Dualists are talking about what is essential to something's being a pain.

Rorty suggests that this sort of hypostatization is exactly the brand of error made historically by, for instance, Locke and Plato. The error is this: '...we simply lift off a single property from something...and then treat it as if it itself were a subject of predication.' Consider, following Rorty, the properties of being red or being good as the Platonic Forms REDNESS and GOODNESS or the Lockean ideas of RED and GOOD. ND PAIN, in other words, is like a Platonic form and a Lockean idea in that it is held to exist independently of its worldly instantiations, while maintaining causal intercourse with the world.