Naming, Necessity, and Mind

I propose to offer an interpretation of Kripke’s Naming and Necessity that has not (I believe) been offered before. I do not say that this interpretation consciously occurred to the author of that work—in fact, I think it didn’t. But I do claim that it illuminates what is going on argumentatively in the text, and it should have occurred to Kripke (though it didn’t occur to me until very recently). Nothing in the text goes against it as far as I can see. It is an interpretation that was suggested to me by reading the text but not one that Kripke intended; I believe, however, that he would have welcomed it. It really systematizes what he was arguing by unifying several strands of argument taken as separate. Let’s think of it as produced by a philosopher named “McKripke” (I should say that I am very inclined to accept the interpretation as correct philosophy). There are three main topics: the nature of naming, the nature of necessity, and the nature of mind. In each case a certain dialectic is set up exhibiting a common form, which I will describe as follows: Is naming reducible to describing? Is necessity reducible to certainty? Is the mind reducible to the body? We begin with a certain chunk of discourse and we ask whether that chunk can be analyzed by another chunk, thereby reducing the subject matter of the first chunk to the subject matter of the second chunk. Thus, we have certain words called “proper names” and we speak of them as “naming” or “denoting” or “labeling” certain entities: the question then is whether this discourse can be reduced to discourse concerning what we call “descriptions” that are said to “describe” or “characterize” or “attribute properties to” certain entities. That is, we ask whether a description theory of names is true. Similarly, we speak of necessity, saying things like “This table is necessarily made of wood”, and we ask whether such talk can be construed as expressing propositions about what we know with certainty—as in “It couldn’t turn out that this table is not made of wood” or “This table is certainly made of wood”. That is, we ask whether an epistemic theory of necessity is true. Thirdly, and similarly again, we start off using words like “pain” and “belief” and we ask whether such talk can be understood as referring to (perhaps meaning) the same as words referring to the body and brain. That is, we ask whether a materialist theory of the mind is true. Some philosophers have maintained each of these reductions, explicitly or implicitly. Thus, Frege and Russell on names, the positivists on necessity (via the notion of analyticity), and many philosophers committed to a physicalist picture of the world. Kripke opposes each of these reductions (analyses, explanations): he thinks naming is not reducible to describing, necessity is not reducible to certainty (epistemic necessity), and the mind is not reducible to the brain (including its functional properties). In each case, he mounts a three-pronged attack: semantic, metaphysical, and epistemological. In the case of names, he argues, first, that sentences of the form “NN is the F” are not (generally) analytic, e.g., “Plato was the teacher of Aristotle”: this is the semantic argument. He then argues that the reference of a name could have been other than the description entails, e.g., Plato might never have taught Aristotle (in some possible world he didn’t): this is the modal (metaphysical) argument. Third, he argues that knowledge of the description commonly associated with the name (or associated with it only by the individual speaker) is not an infallible guide to what its actual reference is, as in the Godel-Schmidt case: this is the epistemological argument. So, the attempted reduction to descriptive reference doesn’t work: names are not disguised descriptions, the naming relation is not a species of the describing relation, naming is a sui generis type of referring. He then goes on to make some suggestions about how naming actually works, introducing causal-historical chains etc. The lesson is that referring takes two fundamentally different forms, naming and describing, neither being reducible to the other; so, names have a different kind of meaning from descriptions. We might call this strategy of argument the “SME strategy”—semantic, modal (metaphysical), and epistemological. It purports to show that naming cannot be analyzed as describing. This is all very familiar and involves little in the way of creative interpretation on my part; I’m just recapitulating the text, more or less. The next stage of interpretation, however, requires some bolder moves, some hermeneutic impositions. Kripke contends that there are two notions of necessity that must on no account be confused, which he calls epistemic and metaphysical necessity; in particular, we must not try to reduce the latter to the former. He gives several examples of metaphysical necessity and argues (convincingly) that they are not reducible to, or explicable in terms of, epistemic necessity. I will put this simply as the claim that metaphysical necessity is not the same as certainty (infallibility, incorrigibility). It is a distinctive type of necessity, over and above epistemic necessity, aptly labeled “metaphysical”. Here again we may apply the SME strategy, though Kripke does not explicitly do so. First, the sentence “Necessity is certainty” is not analytic, so the predicate term cannot analyze the subject term; it expresses a synthetic proposition. Second, there are cases of necessity without certainty and certainty without necessity, so the conditions are neither necessary nor sufficient (metaphysically speaking)—as with “This table is made of wood” and “I am in pain”. Third (and now we add something to N & N), knowledge of certainty does not add up to knowledge of necessity: you can know that something is certain without knowing it is necessary (even when it is), e.g., a mathematical truth, and you can have the former concept without having the latter (you might be modally blind or otherwise incompetent). Knowledge of one property does not give you knowledge of the other property, so they can’t be the same property. There is no a priori entailment from one to the other—because the relevant terms don’t mean the same thing. Just as knowledge of an associated description doesn’t give you knowledge of reference in the case of names, so knowledge of what is certain does not give you knowledge of what is necessary. In sum, the concept of necessity (metaphysical) is not the same concept as the concept of certainty—as the three prongs of SME demonstrate. Thus, no reduction is possible; we are dealing with an irreducible type of fact. A certain modal dualism is therefore in order, as a certain referential dualism is in order for names and descriptions. That is Kripke’s basic message, though he doesn’t put it this way: the arguments are logically similar, structurally parallel. This prepares us for the third main topic of N & N: the mind-body problem. And now it is easier to see the wood for the trees—the argumentative pattern stands out more clearly. The SME strategy is written all over it: first, we have the point about the meaning of (e.g.) “pain”; then the modal counterexamples; then a version of the knowledge argument. Suppose someone claims that “pain” can be analyzed by a bodily or cerebral predicate (let’s say “C-fiber firing” to stick with tradition): the obvious initial reply is that “pain is C-fiber firing” is not analytic, so “pain” can’t mean the same as “C-fiber firing”. Then, second, we have the possibility of pain without C-fiber firing and C-fiber firing without pain (i.e., possible worlds where these things are so). These possibilities rule out an identity theory, given that identity is a necessary relation. Third, we have a knowledge argument: you can know that someone’s C-fibers are firing without knowing they are in pain; there is no a priori link between the two. Kripke doesn’t provide such an argument in N & N, but we know that he provided one later[1] and may have had the idea at the time of the earlier work. Thus, dualism of mind and body is affirmed, as opposed to reductive materialism: the mind is as distinct from the body as naming is distinct from describing, and necessity is distinct from certainty. The same argumentative resources are deployed in all three areas: the meanings aren’t the same, the connection (correlation) is merely contingent (if it exists at all), and knowledge of the one doesn’t give knowledge of the other.[2] Thus, no reduction is possible and duality is the outcome. We can now note various things about this interpretation of Kripke’s treatment of these topics, which may serve to underline the basic structural commonality. One: the topics themselves are not closely related; none is a special case of the others. Indeed, they are quite disparate; yet they each exemplify a common pattern of argument, a certain kind of philosophical method (a methodology). Two: Kripke is not averse to all forms of reduction; he offers some himself. He accepts reduction of natural kinds (“water is H2O”); he provides a quasi-reduction of the naming relation in the shape of causal chains; and he has no qualms about accepting Russell’s theory of descriptions (descriptions are reducible to quantifiers plus identity). Three: he says little positively about each of the areas he defends against reduction; his claims are largely negative. No full analysis of naming, no reply to Frege arguments against denotational theories, no effort to dispel disquiet about what such non-descriptive reference might consist in (it seems rather magical). Likewise, nothing much about the nature, provenance, and problems of metaphysical necessity (for example, how exactly is it known?). Also, no attempt to deal with objections to mind-body dualism or the supervenience of the mental on the physical (does he deny this?). Four (and connected): aren’t each of these topics puzzling, mysterious even? How does the mind manage to reach out to objects without descriptive or conceptual mediation? Isn’t metaphysical necessity rather spooky, inexplicable, contra-empirical? What is it? And isn’t the idea of a separate mental substance rebarbative and contrary to science? In each area there are intimations of the “queer”, the “occult”, the “non-natural”? Yet we don’t find Kripke agonizing over these questions, or even raising them. He seems oddly cavalier. Interpretatively, this provides insight into his philosophical predilections and potential vulnerabilities. Six: he doesn’t tie the topics together but treats them seriatim and independently, perhaps not recognizing the commonality of philosophical moves. Seeing them together gives a stronger sense of the philosophical geography (even geology): we see their place on the map and their deeper underpinnings. Even such diverse problems display a common form, a parallel dynamic—as we are driven this way and that. There is a reason why philosophers favor such quixotic reductions—because the alternative strikes them as worse. The primitive is apt to produce the problematic—unanalyzable denotation, modal metaphysical excess, mysterious mind-stuff. Kripke was too good a philosopher not to be aware of these intellectual dynamics, these conceptual pushes and pulls, but he did little to articulate them or stress their unavoidability.[3] In any case, the indicated interpretation of N & N is along the lines I have suggested: a common argumentative thread hidden beneath the surface, shaping the dialectic, determining the conclusions. He could have called the work Naming, Necessity, and Mind: Some Common Themes. The book is more unified than might appear.[4]

[1] See Adriana Renero’s work on Kripke’s 1979 lectures on philosophy of mind.

[2] It may be useful to give an example of a successful analysis or conceptual reduction–Bernard Suits’s definition of games in terms of freely chosen obstacles to a given goal (see his The Grasshopper, 1978, and my Truth by Analysis, 2012). First, if correct, the analysis will produce an analytically true sentence along the lines of “A game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Second, there will be no possible worlds in which the analysis fails. Third, knowledge of the definiens will suffice for knowledge of the definiendum. A good case can be made that Suits’s definition meets these conditions.

[3] Perhaps the most profound and intellectually revealing thing he ever said was, “I regard the mind-body problem as wide open and extremely confusing” (footnote 77, p.155, the very last words of Naming and Necessity). He realized how vexatiously difficult philosophical problems are, but also how intriguing.

[4] Kripke tried to impose argumentative unity on Wittgenstein in Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, with mixed results. I am suggesting that his own work displays more unity than appears on the surface: there is a pattern to the failures he discerns, despite the variety of subject matter.  

The Age of Mystery

Intellectual historians like to divide up the history of human thought into distinct periods and give them descriptive names: Antiquity, the Middle (Dark) Ages, the Early Modern Period, the Renaissance, the Age of Reason, the Age of Enlightenment, the Romantic Period, the Age of Analysis (I invented that one). But what is the right label for our current age? Does it have an identity of its own? What central idea defines it, if any? We should note immediately that the labels chosen don’t reflect the self-conception of the people falling under them. The ancient Greeks (pre-Socratic and post-Socratic) didn’t think of themselves as “antiquated” or defined by their temporal relation to Socrates; nor did thinkers of the Middle Ages conceptualize themselves as in the middle of anything, still less as “dark”. These labels were chosen by scholars in retrospect to characterize trends of thought that emerged in the fullness of time. No doubt they have some reference to what went through the minds of the individuals they describe, but they aren’t offered as avowed autobiographies (they might be rejected as such). The period I am interested in encompasses the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries: it includes Freud, Marx, Darwin, Mill, Bentham, Frege, Russell, Wittgenstein, Austin, Chomsky, Quine, the positivists, the analytical philosophers, and a lot of scientists (natural and social). I think many practitioners from this period would call themselves “naturalists”—especially those following Darwin and opposed to supernatural tendencies. They are secular, scientific, sane, and self-consciously savvy. They are down-to-earth, level-headed, and no-nonsense—not romantic, mystical, or religious. Some describe themselves as philosophers without the historical baggage of irresponsible speculation, obscure language, and dubious moral uplift. There is nothing priestly about them, or New Age, or Alternative. But from a more elevated perspective a pattern has emerged that is troubling to troubadours of the natural: the varying success of science in the last four hundred years has exposed areas of intractable difficulty. Science (including scientific philosophy) has now had a chance to prove its problem-solving power and has enjoyed notable successes, but it has fallen short of its earlier ambitions (starting with Newton’s “occult” theory of gravitation). Programs that once seemed promising have petered out, hit obstacles, or run aground. Here is a partial list: logicism and formalism in mathematics (Russell’s paradox, Godel’s theorem); behaviorism in psychology (Chomsky, cognitive science); generalized materialism (consciousness, intentionality); causal theories of perception, meaning, knowledge, and reference (sundry counterexamples); the puzzles of quantum physics; the limits of the computer model of mind; the origin of life. These areas are still much in dispute, but it is generally agreed that things have proved harder to crack than was anticipated; the old optimism is now under strain. Not surprisingly, voices have been raised to draw the appropriate lesson: all is not well in the onward rush to solve the “mysteries of nature” (Hume’s phrase). And the reason for this failure of naturalism is naturalism itself—the view of the human mind that has emerged in our post-Darwinian age. It isn’t so much the hold of the supernatural, a recrudescence of religion; it is rooted in the sciences of man. The voices in question include Chomsky, Nagel, McGinn, Pinker, Fodor, Kripke, and others. The old mysteries have not succumbed to the Age of Naturalism, and this has become increasingly evident as time has gone by—though it is not yet generally recognized. Nor should it be: we are still in the throes of the Age of Naturalism ushered in by Darwin and others. We are still trying to come to terms with the change of world-view these thinkers initiated. The old religious conception of ourselves and the universe still haunts and shapes our intellectual outlook (what we might call the “mini-gods” model). It will take some time before the lesson sinks in, but my prediction is that it will eventually sink in. When it does this age will be appropriately designated the Age of Mystery—the age in which the mysteries of nature became recognized for what they are. This age may go on indefinitely or it may come to an end with some new infusion of intellectual firepower: a fundamental mutation of the human brain, the arrival of advanced aliens, the development of artificial intelligence, or some blend of all three. In any case, my point here is that the current phase of intellectual history needs a suitable label and the Age of Mystery strikes me as fitting the bill. It had to come sooner or later—the time at which the limits of human intelligence became evident. Earlier ages did not make it evident (except to the very far-sighted), but glimmerings started to appear during the Renaissance (Locke, Hume, Kant, Newton), and later successes and failures made it increasingly evident. It was only a matter of time before the course of history revealed what should have been clear from the start—we are not gods but unusually brainy primates with an exaggerated opinion of ourselves. We are not only the naked ape; we are also the big-headed (literally) and big-talking (language-using) ape. We are (let’s congratulate ourselves) the cleverest of all the apes, with the highest IQ of any creature evolved upon this (probably dying) planet, but how impressive is that really? It is discouragingly relative. I sometimes think the most impressive thing about us is our art not our science, and certainly not our philosophy; intelligent aliens may marvel at what we have achieved musically and pictorially and poetically, but regard our intellectual efforts as distinctly B+. And it’s hard to imagine encountering an alien civilization whose music, painting, and literature strike us as markedly superior to our own; but it isn’t hard to imagine greatly superior science in an alien civilization (science fiction is full of it). After all, what can you expect of a two-pound brain made of spam that evolved in trees only a few short millennia ago? It took us a long time even to discover science and rational thought (why the delay?), so it isn’t surprising that our form of science should have its weak points and limitations. The miracle is that we know as much as we do (this itself is a mystery in the light of evolutionary science).[1]

[1] If we think of the gods (and God) as projections of the human mind, we find an interesting combination of qualities: they are conceived both as godlike and humanlike. They are seen as just like us in some respects but also markedly superior in other respects. So, we understand ourselves as having conceivable superiors while standing above all other animals. We don’t see ourselves as the pinnacle of perfection—in particular, we acknowledge the possibility of greater intellectual capacity. We are not completely deluded about our intellectual limitations, though we see ourselves as approximating to gods (unlike other animals). In that regard there is much truth in religion. Religion is (among other things) a tacit admission of (non-trivial) intellectual limitation, and hence of the permanent possibility of mystery—despite its attachment to the idea of a supernatural soul.

Phenomenology of Death

What is the phenomenology of death? What is it like to die? What does the final cessation of consciousness feel like? The answer is that there is no phenomenology of death, nothing it is like to die, no feeling of the end of consciousness. As Wittgenstein says, “Death is not an event in life: we do not live to experience death…Our life has no end in just the way our visual field has no limits.” (Tractatus, 6.4311) We don’t experience death because that would require survival of death: we would need to experience the far side of death. Consciousness ends at death, so there can be no consciousness of the transition to its absence—you can’t be conscious of the absence of consciousness. There is something it is like to experience the lead-up to death, an awareness that one is about to die, but there is no experience of the moment of death, its arrival and consummation. You can experience the end of a football game because you experience its aftermath, but you can’t experience the end of your life because you have no experience of its aftermath. You are gone at that crucial moment. No sooner is that moment upon you than your consciousness goes blank. In other words, you don’t experience the final border of your life. The same is true of its beginning: you don’t experience the coming-to-be of consciousness. Now it doesn’t exist, but now it does—but with no consciousness of the transition. That would require being conscious before you are conscious! So, the beginning and end of consciousness have zero phenomenology: it is impossible to employ phenomenological intuition at these crucial junctures. The phenomenological method is useless to gain insight into the borders of consciousness. No doubt it has borders, perhaps precisely detectable (by use of a brain scanner), but your consciousness is powerless to scrutinize the borders: it comes up empty at these terminal points. Thus, the end of consciousness is a mystery to consciousness, not even resolved by directly undergoing it. We have no impression of death at the moment of death, or birth at the moment of birth (I mean the onset of consciousness in the womb). We can’t even imagine the thing, though we know it occurs. We are cognitively closed to the event of dying, in the sense that we have no consciousness of it, and never can as a matter of principle. Wittgenstein is wrong to say that “death is not an event in life”, because there is an event of finally losing consciousness and it can occur in a living body; but what is true is that losing consciousness is not an event in consciousness—unlike, say, having a sudden thought or a sharp pain. As he remarks, the situation is logically like the borders of the visual field: we are not aware of these borders as borders, simply because we have no awareness of what lies beyond them. We know the border exists because we can’t see behind us, but we have no experience of the border as such—we can’t see this border. Death is a temporal border, and this is a spatial border. A generalization suggests itself: consciousness can never be conscious of its borders. This is a necessary truth about consciousness—a de re necessity, if you like. It is a necessity of phenomenology, though it is not verifiable by phenomenological inspection. It is a fact of phenomenology but not a phenomenological fact (did Husserl ever consider it?). We can grasp the intentionality of consciousness by the phenomenological method, but we can’t grasp the limits of consciousness by that method. The finiteness of consciousness is not a phenomenological fact about it. We can never think, “Oh, so that’s what the end of consciousness feels like”. Death is not a datum of consciousness; there are no death qualia. Sartre talked about the nothingness of consciousness, but its transition to nothingness is not an “immediate structure of the for-itself”. If we were conscious of its border, we would be immortal, since every event of losing consciousness would be present to an existing consciousness. It would be impossible for one’s consciousness to die, because it would always be accompanied by an act of consciousness that persists through death, which in turn would require another act of consciousness of its death. No, when consciousness ends it is never conscious ofits ending—it never experiences itself as passing into oblivion. It passes into oblivion without revealing what that process is like, because it is not like anything. We don’t know what it is like to be a bat and we don’t know what it is like to die—but in the one case there is something it is like and in the other there is nothing it is like (though there is something that it consists in). The end of consciousness is a process of some sort, a natural process, but it is not phenomenologically accessible.[1] It is a change of consciousness that is unavailable toconsciousness. Of course (and I have been consciously suppressing this fact throughout) death is not the only end of consciousness in life: there is also going to sleep. And here I will assert a bold conjecture: the death of consciousness is the same kind of event as the loss of consciousness we undergo every night in sleep. It too is not an “event in life”. So, there is nothing very remarkable about the end of consciousness (except that it is the final end): it is a daily occurrence, and it always involves the same basic law of phenomenology, namely that consciousness is never aware of its borders. This is why you never remember going to sleep: you never remember the experience of passing from wakefulness to sleep, because there is no such experience. You know you must have gone to sleep at some point but you had no consciousness of it—it just happened. It is a blank in your mental life. You might remember the thoughts you had while trying to get to sleep, even up to the last second, but you don’t remember the blissful moment of dropping off (strange phrase). For it didn’t occur inyour consciousness. You might even remember a dream you had immediately after falling asleep, because that occurred in your consciousness, but you draw a blank on the period during which you lost consciousness. You went from waking consciousness to dreaming consciousness with a gap in between. Wouldn’t it be interesting to know what this gap was like? But there was nothing it was like—no event in consciousness. You are never conscious of losing consciousness, because that would require consciousness of no consciousness, which is contradictory. So, sleep is like death in this important respect (hence the Big Sleep). Sleep doesn’t intellectually prepare us for death, however, since it too presents us with a cognitive lack: we don’t know what it is like to fall asleep either. Nor could we know this. Still, we know that death is very similar to falling asleep, which is not too terrible a thing. It is the Little Death. Our nightly Little Deaths precede our once-in-a-lifetime Big Sleep. Both are phenomenologically opaque, necessarily elusive, but they are alike in essence. They are both mysterious to us, from the phenomenological point of view, and for the same reason, but at least we have been there before many times. If we never slept, it would be different—then we would have no prior experience of losing consciousness, it would be an alien occurrence. But as it is we have been there many times, so we know what we are in for; it’s nothing new, nothing foreign. Imagine if you belonged to a species that went to sleep once in its life at a predictable time: this might be something feared yet celebrated, with many a ritual and preparatory oration. You might be apprehensive, anxious, and baffled—will you survive this unprecedented fall from consciousness (maybe some one-time sleepers have died)? We at least don’t have to face death with so little experience of its essential nature, i.e., the loss of consciousness. With us it is normal and routine; we just have to accept that this time there will be no waking up again. But the event itself won’t be so unnerving and potentially horrible (our one-time sleepers might be petrified of the process of dying itself, in addition to its outcome). At least we are not completely ignorant of what will be involved when the time comes. In any case, death and sleep are alike in being preceded by an event with no phenomenological reality.[2] This is a result of the very nature of consciousness and its borders: consciousness can never cross its own borders.

[1] Is it a mental event? If so, it is one that ends with an absence of mentality. Does it begin in the mind and end by exiting the mind? Is it psycho-physical? Maybe if we could experience it, we would know, but that is not possible. I leave the question for homework.

[2] We are said to “fall asleep” but not to “fall a-death” and to “die” but not to “sleep-en” (“slipe”?).  Ordinary language resists the analogy, the identity: but couldn’t we say, “I sleepened (sliped) before midnight and I hope not to fall a-death for a long time”?  Of course, our language around death is notoriously tortured, torn between euphemism and appalled recognition (not to mention incomprehension). Let me suggest “to deconscious” instead of “to die”, as in “He peacefully deconscioused last night”—like “decoupled” instead of “divorced”. That would helpfully distinguish the end of the conscious mind from the end of the living body, and gives a suggestion of voluntariness.