Trusting each other

There is no “magic bullet” for democracy.  That is, democracy cannot reside in the institutions, alone.  The people, or a large majority of them, must take their role as responsible decision makers seriously, and they must do their job well.  This idea used to be common to the democratic movements, as in the English lyrics of “The Internationale”:  “We must, ourselves decide our duty.  We must decide, and do it well.”  Democracy requires us to have mutual respect and a sense of justice.  We must make a good-faith effort to exercise good judgment.  We must exercise self-restraint.  We must honestly weigh the good of others against our own interests.  Otherwise, democracy devolves into a struggle between different groups of “the strong” for their own immediate good, and the political quagmire the ancient Greeks called “stasis” prevails.

The people’s faith in each other cannot be naïve.  The problem of the “free rider” serves as an example.  If almost all the people in a society are good, do their jobs, and share the resulting wealth, then it will, at least superficially,  be beneficial for some people to try to take a share without working for it.   Concern about  free riders is certainly a slippery slope.  People of relative privilege may label the less privileged “free riders” (as they are inclined to do in our own, plutocratic society), so as to argue against sharing their wealth.  But despite the potential for abuse, the potential for free riders is real, so this is a slippery slope that must be navigated.  Judgment is required (see above).  But denial is not a solution.

False dichotomies and either-or decision making must be avoided.  The problem of correctly identifying free riders (for example) cannot be turned into a battle between a “right” which identifies all poor people as presumptive free riders, and a “left” which argues that abusers of social privileges do not exist.

Democracy is prey to the problem of generalizing from particulars.  One person or ten betrays our trust, so we conclude that people, in general, cannot be trusted, and design laws to limit people’s freedom of action to narrow, “safe” paths.  This leads to Byzantine, alienating laws, and ironically worsens the problem of people breaking trust, because a person who feels alienated from “the system” sees little reason, other than the fear of punishment, to commit the effort required to make it work.  Transferring the exercise of judgment from the people to the laws, limiting the degree to which people have to think and take conscious responsibility for their participation, is tempting, but is another slippery slope.  There is no magic bullet.  Taken too far, this process weakens democracy, rather than strengthening it.

Trusting people doesn’t mean believing that the people are always right.  It means recognizing, first, that laws, too, can fail.  The laws, after all, are written by some of the same people you’re deciding you can’t trust!  But more importantly, laws cannot be made sufficiently detailed to anticipate every possible situation.  The basis of law is a process of abstraction.  Prioritizing law over judgment means ignoring many of the particulars that arise in any possible situation.  This tends to separate law from justice.  Separating law from justice is alienating, and alienation (as we saw) undermines democracy.

Secondly, trusting the people means recognizing that even if the people err, it is their mistake to make.

The first of these recognitions is that no alternative to trusting the people is functional; the second is that no alternative to trusting the people is just.

This does not mean that a democracy should not establish institutions or pass laws.  (This is where I break, perhaps, with the anarchists.)  But a law should not be viewed as a once-for-all solution to a problem.  The laws should be seen as documentation of a part of the collective experience and wisdom of the past, preserved to inform the judgments of the present.  Such laws exist to prevent the necessity of reinventing the wheel – of forming all judgments fully de novo at all times.  The law should support, and not preclude , the exercise of judgment, and especially it should not preclude the recognition of cases in which the requirements of justice differ from the letter of the law.

Allowing judgment to take priority over the law may require different institutions of justice.  In our legal system, we have a (rather small) jury which is charged with considering only matters of fact, and a judge who is charged with deciding on matters of law.  Nobody is specifically charged with considering matters of justice –  if justice is thought about at all, it is assumed to be fully embedded within the law.  The ancient Athenians heard cases with much larger juries, and no judge.  The advocates for both sides were assumed to bring up relevant points of law, of which jurors were also expected to be reasonably well-informed, and the jury judged (by majority vote) with few restrictions on their scope of responsibility. 

Some kind of hybrid system may be best.  A democratic justice system may require larger juries, randomly selected, with full scope to consider matters of justice as well as matters of fact.  A panel of judges or other learned persons could serve to bring the jury’s attention to matters of law (considered, as above, as a repository of wisdom, to be used as a resource, to guide, but not to bind).  Options other than punishment or acquittal could be considered – mediation, negotiation, restitution for example.  Decisions could be made preferably by consensus, with a fall back of a majority, or super-majority vote if consensus is judged to have failed despite all good-faith efforts.

It’s something to wonder about, at any rate…

 

Note:  The musings in this post arose as reflections on a book I am reading, The Origins of Democratic Thinking: The invention of politics in classical Athens, by Cynthia Farrar.

The Root of All Evil

The root of capitalism is the principle that the possession of property entitles you to a claim on the fruits of someone else's labor.  There is no moral justification for this.  It is on a par with "might makes right" or "the Devil take the hindmost."  Capitalism is thus corrupt at its very core, whatever social benefits it might be deemed to have in any specific time and place.

The logic of capitalism only makes sense if there is an unequal distribution of wealth.  If everybody had equal wealth, there would be no sense in property employing labor; rather, we would tend to evolve a system where men and women collectively used their property and their labor in order to socially produce things (since social production is more efficient than individual production).  Equal distribution of wealth would tend toward a cooperative society, rather than a capitalistic one.

So capitalism arises only in an unequal society; its essential logic guarantees that.  The logic of the working-out of capitalism increases the initial inequality.  If you have only a small amount of property, it is very difficult to make it grow.  Generally, only your constant labor can keep it from shrinking.  If you have a large amount of property, however, it is very difficult to PREVENT it from growing.  The process of being paid for the use of your property returns the borrowed property plus a dividend, over and over again.  The more property you possess, the larger the dividend.  If the amount of property you possess is very large, it becomes virtually impossible to spend the dividend.  Even if your wealth is a bit smaller, only a modest amount of self-restraint is necessary for savings.  So the wealth of rich people grows and grows.  Yes, it is possible for a wealthy person to "go bust" because of bad investments.  But it doesn't happen very often.  And even a wealthy person who, with great fanfare, has  "gone bust",  generally has more residual wealth than a person who wasn't rich to begin with.  Squalor turns out to be relative.

Capitalism is inherently incompatible with democracy, because capitalism concentrates concentrations wealth, and wealth is inevitably power. There is no way to decouple the relationship of wealth and power.  Regulatory tinkering, such as campaign finance rules, can only act as an impediment, an inconvenience to the wealthy when they act to assert their money-power.  Capitalist countries, then, even with republican governmental forms, tend to devolve into de facto oligarchies.  This process can be resisted only by constant vigilance, to limit accumulation of wealth, to restrain the free political exercise of wealth, to balance people power against money power (unions and voter empowerment campaigns).  This vigilance is a lot of work.  When we have won some improvements, "we the people" tend to slack off.  The capitalists never do.  The differential rewards for them - the incentives - are just too immediate and great.  Thus, when times got somewhat better in the postwar period - at least in Europe, the U.S. and Canada - the people became complacent, and in the mid-1970s the capitalists, with their neoliberal/Reaganite/Thatcherite agenda, counter attacked.  And so, here we are today, with economic inequality and poverty at record levels, with a stagnant economy, but with many capitalists declaring "recovery" despite the fact that so many remain unemployed, many, many more underemployed, and almost all of us economically insecure.

So it turns out that not money, but private capital is the root of all evil, arising only in conditions of inequality, sustaining and promoting inequality, and undermining democracy.  Ultimately, if we want secure and just economies, we need to decouple property and income, by recognizing that all capital is socially constructed, and must be socially owned. 

Democratic Decisions

We have no popular model of genuinely collective decision making in our society. Our social theory and practice are dominated by two models of social decision making: one in which a paternalistic authority makes decisions for all of us, and one in which each individual makes “private” decisions on his/her own behalf.

We impose a vague sense of democratic accountability on the authoritarian decision making model, but it is ill-fitting. In the first case, it is imposed on models actually developed in top-down, monarchal or aristocratic societies. In the second case, we elect a small group of people and give them a very broad charge. When it comes down to any individual decision on any given point, there is no reason to expect that the views, desires or opinions of any particular voter are in any way represented. Also, in practice, the small group of elected appoint a larger group, who appoint still more, etc., until we reach the people who actually make and implement decisions. By the time we get down to the person actually deciding, the trail of accountability back to “the people” may be highly attenuated.

A “good” paternalistic decision maker will make decisions in “the people’s interest.” But it is his/her own judgment that is involved – the people are not directly represented. We may introduce a further “democratic” element by requiring public hearings – but the hearings are advisory only, not authoritative. (One is reminded of the role of the Duma or Parliament as first introduced under absolute monarchs.) Similarly, in individual choice (the other model), we may choose to consult with or listen to others, but it is our choice.

What is missing is some form of truly participatory social decision making, where the people get together, debate and discuss fully in direct, unmediated conversation (with no imposition of anyone’s editorial judgment), and then collectively make – whether by consensus or majority rule – binding decisions which affect all. (Before I get corrected, let me acknowledge that it is not true that there is NO application of decision making that approaches this model. Small, New England town meetings, and some meetings of some voluntary organizations, for instance. But it is not a model that has a significant role in our hegemonic social theory and practice.)

It is exactly this space that the Occupy movement, with General Assemblies and other horizontal democratic structures, is trying to fill. It is not surprising that it sometimes works badly – we have no experience with it! (But this is something that can be corrected with practice, and willingness to learn from experience and adapt.) And it is not surprising that many both within and without the Occupy movement are uncomfortable with it – it doesn’t fit our customary conceptual arrangements. But the people of the Occupy movement are making an earnest and heartful effort to provide an alternative model of decision making that our putative democracies sorely need and lack.

Casinos, capitalists and class struggle

The rush of Massachusetts to build casinos and other gambling dens makes me crazy.  The casinos are sold to us as a jobs program - this is almost a pure scam.  It is as if the 1% were to hire a small number of the 99% to construct, and then operate, a gigantic vacuum cleaner, the sole purpose of which was to suck money out of the pockets of the 99%, and deposit it in the bank accounts of the 1%.

Compare this with a genuine jobs bill - the Conyers bill, HR 870, which would tax the 1% (through a small financial transactions tax) and use the proceeds to hire some of the 99% to build and repair things (schools, roads, bridges) that belong to the 99%.

In today's political parlance, the second bill – the genuine jobs bill – is considered class warfare.  Casino construction, which employs some people to better exploit others, is not.  Essentially, "class warfare", for the punditry, is a term used to describe anything that acts effectively to the detriment of one specific class - the ruling class.

Even a casual student of Marx knows that the class struggle is not an option - something one chooses to engage in, or not.  It is an inevitable side effect of a class society.  As long as the economy is structured so that one particular class – feudal landowners, slave-owners, or capitalists – derives its income solely and explicitly by the exploitation of others (aka the workers), then you have a class society, one feature of which will be a struggle over the degree of exploitation.

A Keynesian analysis of a capitalist economy suggests there may be some "sweet spot" for the capitalist class, a level of wages that balances off increased demand and economic activity against a reduced profit margin, so as to maximize the capitalists' overall net income.  But there's no magic way to detect this "sweet spot", and the capitalists' greed is such that they will tend to overshoot when it comes to driving down wages.  Also, manipulating the overall wage rate in the economy, so as to manipulate demand, is beyond the power of most individual capitalists, or even cartels. 

At a given level of output and technology, the individual capitalist can only increase his income by increasing the level of exploitation - his profit.  Any such increase in profit comes directly out of the worker's wages.  So struggle is inevitable.  The only question is whether the workers resist low wages individually (in which case the majority of them are bound to lose), or collectively, through labor unions and political action, in which case they have a chance.  It is this latter form of collective struggle that the right wing insists on calling "class warfare".

A genuine jobs bill, like the Conyers bill, would strengthen the working class, lessen inequality, and make the 99% genuinely better off.  The casino alternative plays some in the working class against others, and its overall effect is to further the impoverishment of the 99% with respect to the 1%. 

Some with in the Occupy movement have started saying "They only call it 'class warfare' when we fight back."  I would add that they only call it "class warfare" when we adopt a strategy that might actually win results.

Saoirse Craig Fitzgerald 6/1/2010 – 12/13/2011

My grandniece, Saoirse Craig Fitzgerald, the first of her generation, and the bravest little warrior I have ever known, died yesterday morning, December 13, 2011, only a little more than 18 months old, after battling nearly half her life against a horrible disease called malignant neuroblastoma. 

I spend a lot of my life struggling, in pitiful small ways, against various forms of injustice.  But sometimes the microcosm overwhelms the macrocosm.  This senseless tragedy visited upon my small family will limit, over the next days and weeks, my ability to be focused on and available for the struggle against more global injustices.  This is the nature of the human condition.  My friends and comrades will keep up the fight.  There is so much pain in the world that humans cannot do anything about, no matter how hard we try.  We must continue to battle against the human-created pains that can with courage and struggle, be cured.

I am an adoptive parent.  Before our adoptions, my then wife and I were trying very hard to conceive a child.  At one point, we had a very early miscarriage - so early that many women might not even have fully realized they were pregnant.  Our pain and loss, even at such an early loss, was enormous.  My mother's first child was stillborn; I am first born only by default.  I am also keenly aware of the pain my children’s biological parents must have been in, to have made such a difficult decision as to give up a child.  So much pain in all of our lives, in so many ways.  The thought sometimes comes, would it have been better if Saoirse and her parents had simply been spared theirs?  If her short span of months had simply never been?

My answer is an emphatic, No!  On a cosmic scale, the span of each of our lives is ludicrously short.  What, in fact, are any of our lives but a few brief strings of moments, some bright, some dark?  As Rahsaan Roland Kirk used to say, all we really have in life are those bright moments.  Every one is precious.  I would not have robbed Saoirse of a single one of hers.  And, for all the pain I feel now, I would not be free of it if the cost was never to have known her.

There have never been any better parents than my niece, Kezia and her husband Mike.  They devoted themselves, fully, completely, intelligently, proactively to that child, without holding anything back for themselves – even when Kezia was, herself, in treatment.  (Yes, for a while, mother and daughter were simultaneously cancer patients.)  And not only were Saoirse’s parents so devoted, but also my sister, Kristina, my brother-in-law Craig (Saoirse’s grandparents), my niece, Tabitha (Kezia’s sister), and Tabitha’s boyfriend, Scott.

The result of all that love and devotion was that every moment of Saoirse’s short life that could have been a bright moment, was one.  The dark moments in her life were all the inescapable ones, caused by that horrible disease.  Every moment that human love and care could possibly have rendered bright, was a bright moment.

That was the gift that my wonderful family gave to that child.

That’s not the American Dream...

I’ve had people tell me that the so-called “American Dream” is about the idea, however false, that anybody can get rich.  Therefore, they argue, if your politics tries to clip the wings of the very rich, people feel you are choking off their dreams, and they won’t support you.

I won’t deny that there’s some truth to that, and if the issue of class fairness is presented the wrong way, you might get that reaction.  But I don’t think the American Dream is really about the ability to get filthy rich, and I think if you frame your arguments the right way, you can get around this obstacle.

Now, everybody has occasionally fantasized about what it would be like to be just stinking rich.  But I don’t think Americans feel that helping some people to get rich is a matter of justice.  I had to frame that sentence carefully.  If I had said “allowing some people to get rich”, a lot of people would think that was just.  To arbitrarily prevent some people from getting rich, “just because”, would be seen by many of us as simply mean.  But if you frame the question in terms of what others would have to give up for that person to become rich, then people hear a different story.

The American Dream is really about the idea that anybody, maybe even everybody, can do well.  It is about prosperity, not opulence.  You should be amply rewarded for a lifetime of honest work, and if you’re especially clever, or work especially hard, you should have a proportionate increase in your level of well-being.  That just strikes most of us as fair.  You should be secure in your enjoyment of these things.  You should do well enough that you can enjoy a few hobbies, and leisure time with your family.  When you’ve paid your dues for 40 years or so, you should be entitled to a comfortable retirement.  You should also have the right to feel confident that your children, and your children’s children will have the right and ability to enjoy the same comforts and opportunities that you have.  This is what the American Dream really means, to most of us.

What we need to get people to understand is that some people’s ability to become super rich, if it is realized, chokes off this dream of prosperity for the rest of us.  When 1%, 2%, even 10% of the people receive half of the total income produced by society every year, and lay claim to more than 70% of the total wealth, they do this by squeezing it out of our paychecks, out of our public or common goods (parks, roadways, schools), out of our healthcare, our retirement – lately, out of the equity that could have accumulated in our homes.
The vast wealth of the lucky few has been justified to us on the basis that they are somehow the engines of economic growth, that they are “job creators”, that their enormous wealth is somehow necessary for the rest of us to be prosperous.  We have now had nearly two generations of experience to prove that that is a lie; that policies to benefit the super rich not only don’t help the rest of us, but actually do us harm.

Since the mid-1970’s, when neoliberal talk of “job creators” and “trickle down economics” began to take hold, the richest 10% increased their share of national income from about 1/3, where it had held pretty steady since the early 1950’s (and which already meant they made between 4 & 5 times, on average, as much as the rest of us), to reach 50% about 2007.  Did this make the rest of us better off?  Total employment did grow a little, at the beginning of that period, before it crashed at the end of it, but it had been pretty stagnant for nearly a decade before the crash.  And how much of that “expansion” in jobs represented low wage, no benefits “Macjobs”, replacing the good “middle class” jobs that people had lost?  And our sense of security in a prosperous future for ourselves and our children has virtually disappeared. 

Trickle down economics does not, and never has worked.  Many, if not most, of the people who originally espoused it never really believed it would.  It was a convenient lie to justify their rampant looting of the economy.  It’s time we put an end to it.  We must put an end to it, if we are ever to reclaim the real American Dream.

“I have seen good working people, Throughout this mighty land. I’ve prayed we’ll get together, And together take a stand. “Then we’ll own those Banks of Marble, With no guard at any door. And we’ll share those vaults of silver That we all have sweated for.”

Metaphysics

I'm not sure I believe in metaphysics.  Perhaps I do. Do my speculations about the minimal requirements for a world in which a mind could evolve constitute metaphysics (“A World for Mind” Sept 2009)?  They may mix in too much practical observation to satisfy some philosophers.  But in any case, some classical efforts at metaphysics, in the sense of using pure reason, free of any empirical evidence, to determine necessary truths about the world, seem to turn on a confusion of observations about human cognitive processes with observations about the underlying reality.

I am thinking of Saul Kripke's Naming and Necessity (which I’ve just read) when I write this.  (I realize there’s some hubris in someone like me critiquing a philosopher of the status of Kripke, but hey, that’s what Persistent Wondering is all about...)  Kripke’s ideas on naming and reference make a lot of sense to me.  I don’t find anything to object to in the idea that names, both of particulars and of general terms, are used to fix a reference, and not, at least in most cases, as a shorthand for a definition.  But when he extends this idea, through possible worlds and the idea of a name as a rigid designator, to questions of identity and necessity, he leads where I find myself unable to follow.

Kripke’s first references, in the book, to the idea of possible worlds strike me as very insightful and important.  He says that “possible worlds are stipulated, not discovered by powerful telescopes.”  Thus, to use his example, if we stipulate, in our counterfactual situation (possible world), that Nixon lost the election, we also stipulate that we are talking about Nixon, and we do not need to go to great lengths to prove the “identity” of the two Nixons in our actual and counterfactual worlds.

I think possible worlds are stipulated.  I think further, they are stipulated for some purpose, perhaps rhetorical, perhaps analytical, in the sense of trying to derive general rules about the universe from observations of particulars (in the rest of this essay, I will try to use “model” and “modeling” in place of “analysis” in this sense to avoid any possible confusion with the notion of “analyticity” as used by e.g. Kant or Kripke).  We stipulate those aspects of deviation from our world as are deemed necessary for our purpose.  The default assumption is that things not so stipulated, and not derivable from things so stipulated, are “the same as” in our world, but in fact, if these things are essential to our model, then this sameness also must be stipulated.  So really, aspects of the possible world which are not in some way stipulated are simply unknown – and we don’t care, because they’re not relevant to our model.

The process of reasoning about a possible world is almost exactly like the process we use to try to predict the outcomes of sequences of events in the real world, and I am certain we use the same cognitive faculties to do both tasks.  There is a difference in intention, though.  When we say “What would A have done if B?” our interest is presumably only academic.  But when we say, “What would A do if C?” we may have a direct interest in the answer.  For example, it may help us decide whether or not to act so as to try to bring about condition C.

But, in any case, a possible world is just a mental construct.  It is a modeling tool.  It is not “real”, in the sense that our world is real.   Of course, it is real, in the sense that our thoughts are real, but questions like the “identity” of objects between possible worlds tell us only about how we think or speak.  They do not tell us anything directly about reality.  They are issues of semantics, or epistemology, not, as near as I can tell, about metaphysics.  Modeling via possible worlds tells us something about the world only if  (1) we are using the model explicitly to explore the relationships between things in the real world, (2) we have all the relevant data, and (3) we reason correctly.

Consider some of Kripke’s examples.  He argues that in our world the astronomical entities Hesperus, Phosphorus and the planet Venus are, in fact, one-and-the-same object; therefore Hesperus=Phosphorus is a necessary truth, although, in a sense, contingent.  It is contingent, because we “could have” discovered that the two names represent distinct objects.  But they do not.  When we speak of a possible world, we do so in our own language, not in the language stipulated for the possible world.  In our language “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” are names for the same object.  If we stipulate a possible world in which “Hesperus” and “Phosphorus” are used to name two different objects, we would say that one, or both of them, is not Hesperus=Phosphorus.  Thus Hesperus=Phosphorus is true, and true in all possible worlds (even those in which the terms are used – in the language of that world – to reference different objects), hence necessarily true.  I don’t really do justice to Kripke’s argument.

Now, if I were reasoning about a possible world in which “Hesperus” or “Phosphorus” referenced different objects, I don’t know if I would say “consider a world in which ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ referenced different objects,” or “consider a world in which Hesperus and Phosphorus were not the same,” but in any case, my manner of speaking certainly doesn’t tell me anything directly about whether Hesperus and Phosphorus really ARE the same.  It seems to me like Kripke is just saying “imagining things to be different doesn’t make them different,” with which I agree.  But a notion of  “necessity”, so defined, doesn’t seem very useful.  Maybe he’s saying something more, about objects and names, something like, “if two (or more names) are used to reference the same object, the object referenced by any of the names is always the same object” – i.e., something is always identical to itself.  This seems at first blush to be trivially true, but I guess I’ve seen some such notion appear in some axiom system often enough that I can accept that maybe it’s not, at least quite.

Kripke’s cats/demons argument (which he attributes, in it’s original form to Hillary Putnam) is another interesting example.  Kripke argues that it could have turned out that cats were not animals, but demons, who chose to look like cats, and to exhibit all the behaviors we associate with cats.  But it did not turn out that way – cats are animals, not demons.  So being an animal is a necessary, or essential, property of cats.  If we stipulated a possible world in which all cats were actually demons, we would say that in that world there were no cats, only demons acting like cats.  Well, I don’t know.  I just stipulated the possible world by saying “all cats [are] demons.”  But, in any case, how we stipulate a possible world doesn’t tell us about anything except how we talk, or, at best, how we think.  So Kripke’s definition of “necessity” as “true in all possible worlds” again seems rather meaningless.  Kripke’s example seems to reduce to “given that cats are not demons, cats are not demons,” which this time really seems to be trivially true.

Kripke’s line of argument becomes more pernicious (potentially, although he refrains from carrying it to a dualist extreme) when he speaks of mental and physical states.  Kripke essentially argues that a mental state cannot be identical with some corresponding physical state, because we can conceive of them separately, and separable.  He contrasts this with heat and molecular motion, which he holds to be identical, because, when we imaging heat separable from molecular motion, what we are really imagining is the sensation of heat, not heat, itself (which is molecular motion), but the sensation of pain, for example, is simply pain, so when we imagine pain separable from the stimulation of nerve fibers, we are really imagining two different things.  Again, I don’t do justice to his argument, I’m sure.

Maybe Kripke and I have different meanings when we talk about “things” being the same or different.  If Kripke means the concept of pain is distinguishable from the concept of a physical state, then I would agree.  These concepts are certainly things or objects (mental objects).  But if we believe these concepts refer to something in the “real” world, then the fact that the concepts are distinct does not prove that the things referenced are.   (I apologize for the scare quotes on “real”.  Language fails me, here.  “Non-mental” world?  Is pain non-mental?)  I do not believe it is actually possible for pain to exist without the corresponding physical state, any more than I believe it is possible for heat to exist without molecules in a state of agitation.  Nor do I believe that it is actually possible for  the physical state corresponding to pain to exist without there being pain (more on this in a moment).  Whether such an state of perfect one-to-one correspondence as I describe should be termed “identity” is a linguistic question.  It has nothing to do with physical reality.  Even if I am wrong, the mere fact that our concepts are separable is information on how we think and speak, but tells us nothing about the world.  It is an epistemological and semantic datum, not a metaphysical one.  Unless metaphysics means something entirely different than I would think.  (Hence my opening doubt, which questions whether metaphysics really means anything not contained in semantics and epistemology.)

I should note that Kripke’s (circa 1972) notion of “physical state” seems to me probably inadequate, which may partially explain his resistance to equating physical and mental states.  I’m reading between the lines, here, but I think he conceives of such physical states much too locally, on the order of stimulation of a few nerve fibers.  I think the equation of mental and physical states requires a much more wholistic notion of physical state.  Thus a dead man, or an anaesthetized one might have certain fibers stimulated, and not feel pain – the rest of his physical state is not arranged conducively.   I also sometimes think there may be a useful (i.e., meaningful) distinction between feeling pain and being consciously aware of feeling pain (may apply, for example, to a person in a coma), but I’m not really sure this distinction turns out to have explanatory value.

All of this makes me want to go back and reread some of Quine’s critiques of the concepts of necessity and analyticity, to see if I now get more out of them, now.  I freely admit that as an amateur philosopher, I’m a pretty good structural engineer.  I may be missing more than a few subtleties.  Still, I can’t keep from wondering...