 A good way to see why analytic functionalists insist that functional characterizations provide meaning analyses is to revisit a debate that occurred in the early days of the Psycho-Physical Identity Theory, the thesis that each type of mental state can be identified with some type of brain state or neural activity. For example, early identity theorists (e.g. Smart 1959) argued that it makes perfect sense (and may well be true) to identify pain with C-fiber stimulation. The terms ‘pain’ and ‘C-fiber stimulation’, they acknowledged, do not have the same meaning, but nonetheless they can denote the same state; the fact that an identity statement is not a priori, they argued, does not mean that it is not true. And just because I need not consult some sort of brain scanner when reporting that I'm in pain doesn't mean that the pain I report is not a neural state that a brain scanner could (in principle) detect.