Theoretical Identity, Reference Fixing, and Boyd’s Defense of Type Materialism

Abstract

In his “Materialism without Reductionism: What Materialism Does not Entail,” Richard Boyd answers Kripke’s challenge to materialists to come up with a way to explain away the apparent contingency of mind-brain identities (such as ‘Pain=C-fiber firings’). Boyd accuses Kripke of an imaginative myopia manifesting itself as a failure to realize that the more theoretical term in the identity (‘C-fiber firings’) is fixed by contingent descriptions – descriptions that might pick out otherworldly kinds of neural events where C-fibres are absent. If this is something we can confuse in the imagination with actual C-fibre firings, then we have an explanation of the apparent contingency of the necessary identity ‘Pain=C-fiber firings.’ However, for this to succeed it must be the case that the reference of ‘C-fiber firings’ is fixed by some contingent description, which is false. Boyd, I submit, has failed to answer Kripke’s challenge after all.