Objects and Arrows

The Economist has a brief, but accurate discussion of the situation in El Paso-Ciudad Juarez here.

These slides (here) outline an argument against Kripkean knowing-the-essence style arguments for dualism.  The talk makes the following claim: We don’t know the essence of a token of pain to be its painfulness (Contra Kripke) Do we know the essence of the type pain? Well, is there any way to get at the type apart from our access to the tokens? If not, then only in the most trivial and uninformative sense do we really know that pain is painful.  I’m guessing that other people have said similar kinds of things already and I’ll be revisiting the argument of this talk and rewriting the paper [which was recently rejected (no ref reports...) by some journal] when I finish up the paper for Jacob Busch and PD Magnus’ volume (as usual I’m late on that).

In any event, I’d be grateful for any critical comments on these slides.