Nagel’s Explanation of the Illusion of Contingency

Kripke argues that theoretical identities are necessary but seem contingent, and that alleged psychophysical identities of types are not in fact identities. In line with Kripke’s strategy for explaining the contingency illusion of theoretical identities (and for the alleged failure of the type-type identitative materialist strategy), while an explanation is available for the illusion of contingency in the case of theoretical identities, in the case of alleged psychophysical identities of types, an analogous explanation is not available. Nagel argues that there are the following two explanations: that of the two types of imagination and that of the tripartite essence of pain or of the fixers of the reference. Hill, in turn, defends Nagel’s two types of imagination.