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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2020
In his influential “Naming and Necessity,” Saul Kripke has deployed a new sort of analytical apparatus in support of the classical Cartesian argument that minds and bodies must be distinct because they can be imagined separately. In the initial section of this paper, I shall first paraphrase Kripke's version of that argument, and then suggest a way in which even one who accepts all of its philosophical presuppositions may avoid its conclusion. In the second section, I shall defend this suggestion against some of the possible objections to it.
Recent materialists have not been overly impressed by the Cartesian claim that minds and bodies (mental states and physical states, etc.) can be imagined or conceived separately from each other. Their usual reply is that this is only to be expected, given the contingent nature of the identify involved. Kripke, however, has argued persuasively that such a reply is unacceptable because it overlooks a crucial fact about the terms in which the identity theory is couched.
1 Kripke, Saul “Naming and Necessity,” in Davidson, Donald and Harman, Gilbert eds., Semantics of Natural Languages (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1973), pp. 253–355.Google Scholar An earlier version of the argument appears in Kripke, Saul “Identity and Necessity,” in Munitz, Milton K. ed., Identity and Individuation, (New York: New York University Press, 1971), pp. 135-64.Google Scholar
2 I was inspired to think about these topics by Levin, Michaell's lucid treatment of Kripke's position in his “Kripke's Argument Against the Identity Thesis,” The Journal of Philosophy, 72 (1975), pp. 149-67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar The extent of my disagreement with Levin's interpretation of Kripke in no way minimizes my debt to him. I have also benefited from the helpful comments of Patricia Kitcher and Philip Kitcher.
3 It is interesting that Kripke's views on the mind-body problem have so far generated more printed discussion than his more general philosophical position. On the former topic, Fred Feldman has questioned Kripke's premise that ‘pain’ is a rigid designator (Feldman, Fred “Kripke's Argument Against Materialism,” Philosophical Studies, 25 (1973), pp. 416-18);CrossRefGoogle Scholar Michael Levin, op. cit., has argued that we can, and indeed must, fix the reference of ‘pain’ through an associated contingent description; and Feldman and William G. Lycan have raised various other points about the argument in an symposium, A.P.A. (Feldman, Fred “Kripke on the Identity Theory,” The Journal of Philosophy, 71 (1974), pp. 665–76; William G. Lycan, “Kripke and the Materialists,” The Journal of Philosophy, 71 (1974), pp. 677-89.Google Scholar Kripke's general philosophical position is discussed in De Sousa, R.B.'s “Kripke on Naming and Necessity,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 3(1974), pp. 447-64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 On this interpretation of Kripke's position, the passage cited above may appear somewhat puzzling. Why, if only one contingent reference-fixer is required for a Kripkean explanation, does he explicitly mention two, of them in an outline of his explanatory pattern? The answer to this question, I think, is that Kripke simply does not intend the quoted passage to represent the definitive outline of his explanatory pattern. This becomes evident when we consider the context in which the quoted passage occurs. Directly before it, Kripke writes that “ … our general paradigm is to redescribe both the prior evidence and the statement qualitatively and claim that they are only contingently related. In the case of identities using two rigid designators, such as the Hesperus-Phosphorus case above, there is a simpler paradigm which is often usable to at least approximately the same effect.” (p. 333, directly before the quoted passage.) These words certainly do not suggest that he takes the two-reference-fixer paradigm as definitive. I suspect that he has mentioned both reference-fixers in the Hesperus-Phosphorus case simply because it would be arbitrary to single out one or the other as the, source of the confusion, and that Levin has been misled by this.