Saul Kripke's Essay 'Naming And Necessity'

Throughout the field of Philosophy, there has been must disagreement about what consciousness is and how it can be explained. Some believe that brain states are the same as mental states. So these people believe that mental states are identical to brain states. This would mean that qualitative consciousness could be a physical. These people have been grouped as physicalists. Saul Kripke is in disagreement with this physicalist view. He believes that qualitative consciousness cannot be a physical thing. Although most of his paper, Naming and Necessity, is mostly about a way of understanding modal semantics, a section of his paper presents an argument against physicalism. If Kripke’s argument is correct, it could mean that consciousness is not something that could be explained by anything physical. So consciousness …show more content…
First, Kripke says that an identity statement is necessary, and it might be discovered through experience, but nonetheless, it’s necessary. This would mean that pain=c fibers firing is a posterori and necessary. In modal logic, necessary truth means that it is always true no matter what, even in every possible world (this will be discussed later). But the problem with this is that it is presumed that Kripke believes that pain=c fibers firing is an identity, and therefore is necessary, because both terms are rigid designators. Rigid designation means that a certain term refers to the same thing in every possible world; depending on if the thing exists or not. Kripke explained earlier in that paper that pain is in a fact a rigid designator, but in the ‘Modal Arguments’ section, he doesn’t seem to argue for why he believes that c fibers are rigid designators; he just assumes they are. “'C-fibers' is a rigid designator, as I will suppose here” (Kripke, 1980,