CCCP

Abstract

This chapter is concerned with Crispin Wright’s critique, in his 2002 “The Conceivability of Naturalism,” of the well-known argument developed in Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity against the identity of pain with C-fibre firing. Kripke argued that if the identity held it would do so necessarily, so that the identity theorist would have the task of explaining away the apparent conceivability of pain without C-fibre firing and C-fibre firing without pain. Wright identified a principle underlying Kripke’s argument (the “Counter-Conceivability Principle,” to the effect that a clear and distinct conception of a situation is the best possible evidence of its possibility), and suggested that Kripke’s deployment of it against the identity theory resulted in failure. The present chapter raises some doubts about the details of Wright’s diagnosis of the flaw in Kripke’s argument, and makes a contribution of its own to our understanding of the aetiology of modal illusion.