Did Saul Kripke Really Imagine Disembodied Pain?

 

Much has been said about the use of the imagination in philosophy. You find imaginative thought experiments all over the place. (Philosophical zombies and Mary the colour scientist are good examples.) It dates back to Descartes. However, the use of the imagination was reprised by Saul Kripke and others in the early 1970s. Nowadays, philosophers like David Chalmers and Philip Goff extensively rely on what they call “conceivability”. (Conceiving and imagining are distinguished from each other by some philosophers.)

Paul Austin Murphy

7 min read

·

Mar 13, 2025

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Saul Kripke (1940–2022) and René Descartes (1597–1650)

“All arguments against the identity theory which rely on the necessity of identity, or on the notion of essential property, are, of course, inspired by Descartes’ argument for his dualism.”

— Saul Kripke, Note 19 of ‘Identity and Necessity’.

The American philosopher Saul Kripke worked on his (to use his own words) “Cartesian intuitions” when he tackled the mind-body problem. Many of those intuitions were about what is, and what is not, logically possible.

Kripke is a very relevant philosopher to bring into any debate about the use of the imagination — or, as it’s often classed today, conceivability — within philosophy. That’s because he seems to have held two contrasting arguments: (1) One argument is used to advance his position on the acceptable use of the imagination in philosophy. (2) The other argument is used to criticise the use of the imagination by his critics.

In the first instance, Kripke informed his audience about an act of imagination which actually misleads us (metaphysically speaking). He wrote:

“[W]e thought erroneously that we could imagine a situation in which heat was not the motion of molecules. Because although we can say that we pick out heat contingently by the contingent property that it affects us in such and such way.”

Kripke also offered us the examples of imagining that water is not H₂O, as well as the case of a person conceiving of a true mathematical theorem to be false or false theorem to be true. (Kripke gave the example of Goldbach’s conjecture.)

On the other hand, Kripke also believed that imagination (or what we can conceive) can tell us something very important about various philosophical issues. In Kripke’s own words:

“[J]ust as it seems that the brain state could have existed without any pain, so it seems that the pain could have existed without the corresponding brain state.”

Kripke stressed our ability to imagine a pain state without its correlated brain state (formerly characterised as the “firing of C-fibres”). Thus, Kripke concluded (to paraphrase):

If we can imagine mental states without their correlated brain states, then such states are possible.

Alternatively put, Kripke was arguing that there’s no necessary identity between mental states and brain states.

Misimagining

Kripke was aware that philosophers criticised his emphasis on both the imagination and “intuitions”. However, he didn’t say much about either. He did tell us that a “materialist” (it needn’t be a materialist!) “has to show that these things which we can imagine are not in fact things we can imagine”. The Cartesian intuitionist is imagining something when he imagines, but the argument in the following is that he’s not imagining what he believes he’s imagining. He’s not imagining, for example, disembodied pain. So no one is claiming that Kripke didn’t imagine something that worked as a substitute (or a surrogate) for what he believed he was imaging.

Of course, Kripke might well have asked the following question: How do you know that I’m not imagining this? However, his critic could have replied: How do you know that you are? How do I know that you are?

But there’s a little problem here. In the same paragraph Kripke says that the materialist

“has to hold that we are under some illusion in thinking that we can imagine that there could have been pains without brain states”.

This is very different to imagining an actual pain without a brain state. Loosely, perhaps anyone could imagine a pain without a brain state… However, what is being imagined in these instances? Not an actual pain, but some kind of vague possibility that doesn’t involve imagining an actual pain without a brain state.

Disembodied Pains?

What is it to “imagine my pain existing even if the state of the body did not”? Drawing on some of Kripke’s own arguments, doesn’t the imaginer need to literally be in pain in order to imagine his pain? After all, when it comes to pain, many have argued that there’s no reality-appearance distinction to be made between imagining a pain and actually being in pain [see here]. If that’s the case, then no one imagines pain existing even if the state of the body did not simply because no pain is imagined in the first place.

All that said, the words “imagine my pain existing even if the state of the body did not” aren’t clear. Arguably, in this instance an actual pain needn’t be imagined at all, let alone felt. In that case, then, what is imagined? The behavioural manifestations of pain? That obviously wouldn’t work for Kripke’s argument. So once the body and brain are (imaginatively) erased (along with the behavioural manifestations of pain), then what on earth is left?

Again, what exactly did Kripke imagine when he imagined a bodyless pain? Did his pain float free in the ether? In this case, did Kripke imagine, say, a tooth ache without any teeth, or a headache without a head?

What about psychological pain? Take depression. Even in this case depressive pain is intimately linked to many physiological symptoms and changes. In other words, psychological pain isn’t either abstract or disembodied: it is at least partly physical. (Some would say entirely physical.)

Kripke went further:

“We can perhaps imagine my not being embodied at all and still being in pain, or, conversely, we could imagine my body existing and being in the very same state even if there were no pain.”

Kripke supposedly imagined two things here. (1) He imagined “not being embodied at all”. (2) He imagined being in pain without having a body. As already stated, to imagine a pain is to be in pain. (What is imagined if there is no actual pain?) Kripke imagining being disembodied is also problematic. What is it that he imagined when he imagined himself disembodied? What was it, precisely, that was disembodied? The “I” or the “soul”? (Berkeleyan idealists touch on something similar in response to someone saying that he could imagine a tree falling without anyone around to hear it. Berkeleyans respond by arguing that all the imaginer is doing is imagining himself being there, perhaps in some vague supposedly disembodied state. Thus, he surreptitiously imagines what he would hear — with his physically-embodied ears, etc. - when the tree is falling.)

In a very loose sense, Kripke might have “imagine[d] [his] body existing and being in the very same state even if there were no pain”. Sure. Kripke could also have imagined his body existing and being in the same state and yet having a pain in a completely different area of the body. He could have even imagined being in the same physical state and being a (philosophical) zombie…

However, no actual pain was ever imagined.

So what was imagined? The behavioural manifestations of being in pain? They would have been easy to imagine.

Imagining Different Inventors of Bifocals

Kripke’s imaginative abilities are used across the board in his paper ‘Identity and Necessity’. For example, Kripke — and everyone else — could have easily imagined someone else inventing bifocals other than Benjamin Franklin. Here all Kripke needed to do was to use his… imagination. After all, I can imagine Hitler inventing bifocals. I can also imagine bifocals never having been invented at all.

Imagination also comes to the rescue in Kripke’s case against the American philosopher David Lewis. Kripke told us that Lewis imagined Richard Nixon himself inventing bifocals or “getting [G. Harold] Carswell through”. Apparently, Lewis believed that it was (is?) the actual Nixon who did these things at other possible worlds. However, Kripke argued that Lewis only imagined Nixon’s “counterparts”, not “our Nixon”.

Another of Kripke’s examples is a philosophical opponent imagining this lectern being made of ice, rather than wood. Kripke argued that what his opponent was actually imagining was not this lectern, but another one that existed in a “counterfactual situation”. However, if one is an essentialist like Kripke, then this lectern must be made of wood. Regardless of the truth of that essentialist position, what was it that was being imagined when Kripke’s opponent imagined this lectern being made of ice? Kripke argued that he didn’t imagine this lectern being made of ice, but a lectern being made of ice. That is, a lectern that looked the same as the wooden lectern in all respects… except for being made of wood.

Now to ram the point home. We see the same scenario played out when Kripke discussed Hesperus and Phosphorus. Kripke told us that his philosophical opponents “may mean that they can actually imagine circumstances that they would call circumstances in which Hesperus would not have been Phosphorus”. Thus, Kripke made the same point that no such thing was actually imagined. Indeed, Kripke was explicit about his own case against these imaginers. For example, he argued that his opponents “thought erroneously that [they] could imagine a situation in which heat was not the motion of molecules”. Kripke is stronger elsewhere when he used the word “mis-imagined”. That is, he argued that the imaginers believed that they’d imagined scenario x, but they didn’t. They actually imagined some surrogate or counterpart of x.

Yet, ironically, the same kinds of thing can be said about Kripke’s own use of his imagination when he claimed to have imagined his own disembodied pain.

Note: Phantom Pains

It’s worth stressing the case of “phantom pains” — which belong to phantom parts of the body — here. In this case, the sufferer isn’t consciously imagining pain as part of a Cartesian thought experiment. Instead, he’s actually feeling pain regardless of his conscious acts or will. (How could we know that?) What’s more, even phantom pains require brain states. And phantom pains are actual pains (although this is hard to establish).

Oddly enough, Descartes himself mentioned phantom limb pain [see here]. He argued that because the mind is connected to the body at the pineal gland, then it’s possible that the pineal gland might be affected by stimuli which didn’t correlate with any actual parts of the body. Yet even in this case of a phantom pain that was part of the “substance” that is the mind, it was still connected to the body via a part of the brain.

Problems With the Faithful Disciples of Wittgenstein

This essay will concentrate on a paper written by the English-American philosopher Gordon Park Baker. He is (or was) an influential Wittgensteinian. And, like most Wittgensteinians, he seemed to believe that almost everyone else “gets Wittgenstein wrong”. Indeed, Baker dismissed all the well-known “interpretations” of the Austrian philosopher. That said, his paper is interesting, and it covers a lot of ground. He also focuses on the nature of philosophy itself, as Wittgenstein himself did.

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“[I]t seemed to us that misinterpretations of passages in the Investigations were so extensive that it would be worth trying to write a detailed analytical commentary. [ ] We talked endlessly about what we had found in Wittgenstein’s manuscripts and typescripts, and debated how it should be understood.”

— P.M. Hacker discussing his work with G.P. Baker. [See source here.]

Gordon Park Baker (1938–2002)

Typically for a Wittgensteinian, Gordon Park Baker runs through a long list of the ideas of Ludwig Wittgenstein which many people regard as being characteristic of his views, positions and work. However, according to Baker, it’s all “caricature”! To quote Baker directly:

“According to this influential interpretation, we should constantly remind ourselves that words are extraordinarily vague and flexible in meaning, that the patterns for their correct use are always more or less indeterminate, and that there are countless ways of using words and sentences in speech. Natural languages are allegedly chaotic, and therefore Wittgenstein meant to exclude the possibility of constructing a theory of meaning for a natural language. There are only limited opportunities for giving any definite descriptions of concepts, and even when the only legitimate task for a philosopher is still destructive: ‘whenever someone else wanted to say something metaphysical, to demonstrate to him that he had failed to give a meaning to certain signs in his sentences’. Apart from exposing the nonsense of some philosophical pronouncements, one should apparently be content to leave *everything* as it is.

“This interpretation of Wittgenstein’s characterisation of philosophy is a caricature of his conception.”

Gordan Baker’s one-upmanship isn’t really a surprise. Other hard-core Wittgensteinians often say similar things. One wonders, then, what’s left of Wittgenstein once the supposed caricatures are removed. Something “mystical”? Something “unsayable”? Something both mystical and unsayable? Or, more critically, something that only a True Wittgensteinian like G.P. Baker — and P.M. Hacker — would recognise? After all, it was difficult for me personally to find anything left over (i.e., in Baker’s paper) that was distinctively Wittgensteinian and not a caricature.

Wittgenstein’s Metaphilosophy

It’s best to introduce the minutia of Wittgenstein’s philosophy within the context of his metaphilosophy. Or, rather, within the context of Baker’s own metaphilosophy. That’s said because throughout the paper I’ll be concentrating on (φιλοσοφια: εικων και ειδος — ‘Philosophy: Image and Form’) it’s hard to tell whether it’s Baker’s own position being presented, or Wittgenstein’s.

Anyway, Baker wrote the following words about philosophy:

“It has no distinctive subject-matter: there are no indispensable philosophical concepts and no body of philosophical truths. [ ] Similarly, *there are no indispensable philosophical methods and none that are sacrosanct*. Any procedure may be appropriate, even questions, jokes, metaphors, or imaginative invention. Philosophy cannot be ranked alongside the sciences, or above or below them.”

Although many philosophers and laypeople would agree that one can philosophise about any subject-matter whatsoever, they’d still argue that philosophy does have “distinctive subject-matter[s]” (such as metaphysics, epistemology, mind, ethics, etc.). In addition, such philosophers wouldn’t necessarily like to think in terms of “indispensable philosophical concepts”. That’s because the word “indispensable” has an almost modal quality to it. As for “philosophical truths”, it’s hard to say. One would presume that Baker believes they’re dispensable too. However, philosophers with an historical awareness would be careful here — even if they most certainly aren’t Wittgensteinians.

Wittgenstein did once say that it would be interesting to compose an entire work of philosophy made up of jokes. (Jacques Derrida said something similar.) In his own words (although this quote is disputed):

“A serious and good philosophical work could be written consisting entirely of jokes.”

There’s no strong reason to be against this idea. That said, it’s hard to know what it means and how it could be done. Moreover, some commentators have argued that Wittgenstein was taking the piss in most of his works anyway. (The same has been said about, yes, Derrida.) Indeed, recently, a George Weeks responded to one of my articles on Wittgenstein by telling me that “[o]ne of my philosophy professors in undergraduate school, thought that Wittgenstein was putting us all on”.

Perhaps the last sentence in the passage above is one of the most characteristic of Wittgenstein’s positions: “Philosophy cannot be ranked alongside the sciences, or above or below them.” This position was held, arguably, in both the Tractatus period and in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein certainly believed that philosophy is (to use a less judgemental word than “above” or “below”) outside science, and therefore not part of science. During the 1920s, Wittgenstein believed that the philosopher’s job (or one of them) was to dig deeply into scientific propositions in order to see what he can find. In the later work, Wittgenstein didn’t concern himself much with any of the sciences — save, perhaps, psychology. (He retained an interest in mathematics.) He was more interested in the mistakes that philosophers have made, and still make. So, despite Wittgenstein’s “piecemeal approach”, there was always a metaphilosophical strain in all his work. (The word “metaphilosophy” wasn’t used in Wittgenstein’s day.)

Wittgenstein was (to use the melodramatic term) “anti-philosophy” during his Tractatus period and for a long time after that. According to Baker’s Wittgenstein at least, Wittgenstein wasn’t really doing “theory” or offering “theses” because his true enterprise was a series of “attempts simply to clarify the logical syntax of language”. Thus, this wasn’t philosophical creation: it was the philosophical/logical analysis of language. That is, it was an analysis of the language that all philosophical expressions have been, and must be, expressed in. That means that there’s no expositions of idealism, realism, mind-body dualism, etc. here, but simply an analysis of the language in which all these philosophical positions are expressed. This is a metaphilosophical (or metalinguistic) enterprise. All this also meant that, according to Baker’s Wittgenstein,

“the statements of everyday language are in perfect logical order, immune to rectification or modification in the light of philosophical theorising”.

Wittgenstein, Baker and Frege

One can sympathise with late Wittgenstein’s problem with Gottlob Frege’s semantics. After all, Frege believed that “the reference of a sentence is the True or the False”. So Baker understandably asks his readers if Frege “arrive[d] at the idea [ ] by reflecting on the use of the words ‘true’ and ‘false’”. Or, instead, did he “conclude that facts are true thoughts by careful examination of the concept of a fact”? Intuitively, Frege’s positions are astonishing — on par with the crazy metaphysics (such as Meinong’s) that analytic philosophers reacted against in the early 20th century. Frege’s semantics is crazy because it’s essentially stipulative in nature. (Just as Bertrand Russell’s idea that a proper name must refer to an existent or real entity.) To go all Wittgensteinian for a moment, one doesn’t discover what the True and the False are by journeying into the platonic ether and discovering them. Instead, one “reflect[s] on the use” of the words “true”, “false” and “fact”. The problem here, however, is that no conclusion about these words (or concepts) will ever be decisive simply because they’re embedded in “language games”, practices, customs, and “forms of life”.

Baker makes clear that Wittgenstein reacted just as much against Frege and Russell than he did against his own Tractatus. That said, it’s of course the case that the Tractatus owes a lot to the work of Frege. More relevantly, Frege epitomised a way of philosophising which Wittgenstein strongly reacted against in his later works. And there’s a passage from Baker that clarifies this certain style of philosophising very well when he wrote the following:

“In his view, no language-user had known the senses or the references of numerals or of the predicate ‘number’ until he revealed them.”

What about adverbs, rather than numerals? -

“[T]he suspicion is that puzzlement is the product of prior commitment to a philosophical theory. Adverbs do not fit neatly into first-order quantification theory: we have faith that this system of logic must really be sufficient to account for all valid arguments. But why elevate this recalcitrance of adverbs to fit our preconceptions about logic into the allegation that we do not *understand* the role of adverbs in language? It is predetermined by the question, what would count as understanding.”

In terms of the first passage, the senses or the references of numerals, etc. were deemed to be hidden. Yet Wittgenstein later held the position that “nothing is hidden”.

Oddly enough, it’s hard to understand the phrase “know[] the senses or the references of numerals”. What is it to know these things? Was it mathematicians or philosophers who didn’t know these things? Both? It seems that it was both, or at least Baker tells us that “[i]n his view, no language-user had known…” Clearly, not knowing these things doesn’t matter to either mathematicians or laypeople. They still use numerals and practice mathematics.

How did Frege himself know what the true references or the senses of numerals were? How could this be established? Through logical analysis? So how did Frege’s logical analyses take him to numbers as they truly are?

As for adverbs, here’s where “theory” is mentioned. Baker makes it seem as if philosophers tried to fit the round shape of adverbs into the square holes of their “system[s] of logic”. That is, philosophers upheld systems of logic, and they were intent on making adverbs — and much else — fit into them.

Theory vs Descriptions

The phrase “nothing is hidden” is a generalisation, and Wittgensteinians often tell us that Wittgenstein didn’t like generalisations. Many people, not just explicit Wittgensteinians, also tell us that Wittgenstein was against theory. Baker doesn’t seem to buy this. Or, at the least, he raises the possibility that Wittgenstein often generalised in the following passage:

“Although he officially eschewed explanations and encouraged detailed descriptions of differences, his later writings are peppered with important generalisations. He claimed, for example, that inner states stand in need of outward criteria, that the meaning of a word is its use in a language [ ].”

As for theory, Baker continued:

“This might seem to be merely an extension of the practice evident in the Tractatus, for there his views about the descriptive task and prophylactic nature of philosophy did not prevent his constructing a complex and sophisticated theory about the essential nature of any possible language.”

Baker’s final comments on these issues are very direct:

“These observations leave open a range of unflattering conclusions. Did [Wittgenstein] stigmatise others’ pronouncements as theories and label his own ‘descriptions’ solely on the grounds that his were (true) grammatical propositions whereas theirs were not? Or did he fail to practise what he preached? Or were his remarks on philosophy disingenuous — a smokescreen to hide his own theory-building?”

Again, many Wittgensteins, and those who’ve simply sniffed a bit of Wittgenstein, say that “Wittgenstein was against theory”, or that he “wasn’t saying anything”, and I, personally, have never really understood what such phrases mean. Indeed, even when I’ve looked into this issue, it was still not clear to me.

If we’re specific, and pick up on Baker’s opposition between “theories” and “descriptions”, we can see that descriptions do have an almost empiricist ring to them, and that would give them a non-theoretical flavour too. However, why was Wittgenstein describing anything at all, or citing his particular examples? What motivated his selections of things to describe? Perhaps here’s where the theory hides. That is, perhaps there was a theoretical reason why Wittgenstein described the things he described. His carefully chosen examples, too, might have been chosen because there was something he wanted to say. Moreover, what he wanted to say was obviously over and above the descriptions and examples. Indeed, it may even be the case that the descriptions and examples themselves tacitly contain theory.

Baker put the supposedly anti-theory position of Wittgenstein in a later passage when he told his readers that “philosophy consists in purpose-relative clarification of grammar”. Here again it can be asked why on earth Wittgenstein would have wanted to clarify anything at all if it weren’t for prior theoretical (or at least philosophical) motivations which themselves couldn’t have had anything to do with clarifications. Whether or not these prior motivations were examples of Wittgenstein’s theoretical views depends on how we read the word “theory”. Yet it’s still the case that his clarifications of “grammar” aren’t pure and innocent. Indeed, doesn’t one’s conception of grammar itself arise from theory? Even if nothing is hidden when it comes to grammar, that doesn’t also mean that there are no concerns, motivations and even theories “behind” the analyses.