Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2plfb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-27T11:21:53.294Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Criteria of Personal Identity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 September 1975

Karl Ameriks
Karl Ameriks*
Affiliation:
University of Notre Dame
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

The primary objective of this paper is to improve the defense of the thesis that

(1) bodily continuity is the primary criterion of personal identity.

This is to be done by establishing (in Parts Ill and IV) that there is a unique sense in which

(2) bodily continuity is a necessary condition of personal identity.

A secondary objective of the paper is to illustrate (in Part I) the way in which the value and validity of (2) has been obscured in recent defenses and criticisms of (1), which inappropriately interpret it in terms of the claim that

(3) bodily continuity is a sufficient condition of personal identity.

Since the truth of (3) will be denied, the defense of (1) will also involve arguing (in Part II) that the traditional alternative to the bodily criterion, namely the criterion of memory and psychological characteristics, not only is not a necessary condition of personal identity but also is not a sufficient condition.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 7 , Issue 1 , March 1977 , pp. 47 - 69
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 See especially, Williams, B.” Are Persons Bodies?” See also his “Personal Identity and Individuation,” “Bodily Continuity and Personal Identity,” and “The Self and the Future,” all included in Problems of the Self(Cambridge, 1973).CrossRefGoogle Scholar All Williams and text page references will be to this book.

2 Vesey, G. Personal Identity (Open University Press, 1973), p. 31Google Scholar ff. Vesey quotes Rose, S. The Conscious Brain(Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1972)Google Scholar, who postulates that a “memory may well be stored in many different parts of the system,” a “redundancy”which suggests the possibility of every memory being preserved in each half of a bisected brain. Cf. Puccetti, R. “Brain Transplantation and Personal Identity,” Analysis, vol. 29 (1969), pp. 65–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Nagel, T. “Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness,” Synthese, vol. 22 (1971), pp. 396–413.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

3 For dissenting views on these points see Prior, A. “Opposite Number,” Review of Metaphysics, vol. 11 (1957), pp. 196–201Google Scholar; and Chisholm, R. “The Loose and Popular and the Strict and Philosophical Senses of Identity,” in Perception and Personal Identity(Cleveland, 1969), pp. 82–106.Google Scholar

4 For arguments against fission preserving continuity see Nelson, Jack “Logically Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Identity Through Time,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 9 (1972), pp. 177–185.Google Scholar I will be using the term “continuity” informally and will speak of two things as discontinuous if there are no ordinary observable causal connections between them. Thus (contra Nelson) a thing can retain bodily continuity even if it undergoes a change in volume which is mathematically discontinuous.

5 “Core body” suggests two meanings: (i) the minimal neural skeleton which humans in fact use in maintaining consciousness; (ii) whatever material body can serve the function of sustaining an information state complex enough to be called human. My argument need appeal only to a continuity of body in sense (ii), though in fact this would generally involve a continuity of body in sense (i) as well. Cf. Long, Douglas “The Bodies of Persons,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 71 (1974), pp. 291–301.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

6 Shoemaker, S. “Wiggins on Identity,” Philosophical Review, vol. 79 (1970), p. 541.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

7 Wiggins, David Identity and Spatia-temporal Continuity(Oxford, 1967), p. 55.Google Scholar

8 Shoemaker, op. cit.

9 Puccetti, R. “Remembering the Past of Another,” Canadian journal of Philosophy, vol. II (1972-3), p. 527.Google Scholar Cf. his “Brain Transplantation and Personal Identity,” op. cit., p. 71.

10 See e.g., Puccetti, R. “Mr. Brennan on Person's Brains,” Analysis, vol. 31 (1970), p. 33.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11 Shorter, J. M. “Personal Identity, Personal Relationships, and Criteria,“ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 71, (1970-71), pp. 165–186.Google Scholar Quinton, A. “The Soul,” journal of Philosophy, vol. 59 (1962), pp. 393–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Quinton does consider the reduplication problem but says “the positional difference in the two bodies provides the answer” (p. 405), and inexplicably regards this compatible with the defense of the soul as the principle of personal identity.

12 Shoemaker, speaks of the possibility of memory “tributaries” being channeled into other persons in a way similar to a blood transfusion (“Persons and Their Pasts,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 7 (1970), p. 297)Google Scholar. Miri, Mrinal explicitly compares memories to transportable “pictures in a box” (“Memory and Personal Identity,”Mind, vol. 83 (1974), p. 9).Google Scholar

13 “Remembering the Past of Another,” op. cit., p. 528.

14 For arguments that memory must meet a causal requirement, see Martin, C. B. and Deutscher, Max “Remembering,” Philosophical Review, vol. 75 (1966), pp. 161–196.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

15 For the full version of this argument see Shoemaker, S. “Persons and Their Pasts,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 7 (1970), p. 280.Google Scholar

16 “Remembering the Past of Another,” op. cit., p. 531.

17 “Persons and Their Pasts,” op. cit., p. 542. On the conditions of an” appropriate“ causal relation, see Deutscher and Martin, op. cit., p. 181. An example of an inappropriate relation would be remembering something just because someone tells you about it even if their knowledge depends on a report you gave.

18 Shoemaker, “Wiggins on Identity,” op. cit., p. 543.

19 Ibid.

20 See e.g., Gert, B. “Personal Identity and the Body,” Dialogue, vol. 10 (1971), p. 468CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Penelhum, T. Survival and Disembodied Existence(London, 1970), p. 89.Google Scholar For a recognition that admission of clairvoyance leaves the issue undecided, see Daniels, C. “Personal Identity,” American Philosophical Quarterly, vol. 6 (1969), pp. 226–232.Google Scholar

21 Miri's, Mrinal recent defense of the bodily criterion fails to convince because it insists in this way on construing the psychological criterion so narrowly as to just involve memory. See “Memory and Personal Identity,” Mind, vol. 82 (1973), p. 14.Google Scholar

22 Parfit, D. “Persoal Identity,” Philosophical Review, vol. 60 (1971), P. 20.Google Scholar

23 For definitions and defenses of the spatio-temporal continuity of the physical world, see Eli Hirsch, “Essence and Identity,” and R. C. Coburn, “Identity and Spatio-temporal Continuity,” in Munitz, M. ed., Identity and Individuation (New York, 1971).Google Scholar

24 Cf. Armstrong, David A Materialist Theory of Mind(London, 1968), pp. 17–18.Google Scholar

25 See Penelhum, op. cit. I do not understand claims like Harrison's, J. that a person might be found to have become a “non-standard body … like a mirror image or rainbow” (“The Embodiment of Mind or What Use is Having a Body?“ Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, vol. 74 (1973–74), p. 43)Google Scholar. Even more bewildering is the claim that although disembodied persons cannot be seen they could be heard, “for to hear a person is not to hear his body, but to hear noises which he makes” (Ibid., p. 53).

26 For an exposition of this point see Enc, Berent “Numerical Identity and Objecthood,” Mind,vol. 84 (1974), pp. 10–24.Google Scholar

27 For an expression of this view and an informal definition of “contiguity” as it is used here, see Shoemaker, “Time Without Change,” Journal of Philosophy,vol. 66 (1969), pp. 367, 377, 381.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

28 Penelhum, T. “Personal Identity, Memory, and Survival,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 56 (1959), p. 894.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

29 See e.g., Peter Unger, “Experience and Factual Knowledge,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 64 (1967), pp. 152–173.

30 See Goldman, Alvin” A Causal Theory of Knowing,” Journal of Philosophy,vol. 64 (1967), pp. 357–372CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Holland, Alan “Retained Knowledge,” Mind,vol. 83 (1974), p. 363Google Scholar: “for a given piece of knowledge to be counted as the same original piece of knowledge, and thus as a case of memory knowledge, it has to be re-identified as the knowledge arising from the very circumstances which gave rise to the original knowledge.“

31 On the concept of a “trace” see Deutscher and Martin, op. cit., p. 387.

32 See above, note 17.

33 See Harrison, op. cit., and Strawson, P. Individuals(London, 1959)Google Scholar. Strawson is criticized by Miri, M. “Persons and Their Bodies,” Philosophical Studies, vol. 24 (1973), pp. 407–411CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Balinowitz, V. “More on Persons and Their Bodies,“ Philosophical Studies,vol. 27 (1975), pp. 63–64.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 Parfit, op. cit., p. 11; d. Shoemaker, “Persons and Their Pasts, op. cit., p. 283.

35 Williams, op. cit., pp. 47–51. I am not assuming that Williams’ exposition is convincing. D. Cooper· has argued that the persons could behave afterwards just as Williams says even when in fact there clearly has been no body exchange. For the same reactions could have resulted even if there had not been a complete memory transfusion but just an operation such that each person would have the impression of having previously decided that what was his present body should be the tortured one. “Memories, Bodies, and Persons,” Philosophy, vol. 49 (1974), pp. 255–263.

36 One problem is Williams’ “platitudinous” exception from one's concern of “those states which in themselves exclude experiencing pain, notably unconsciousness” (p. 53). The whole case for identifying with the future despite the operation depends on this qualification, but if closely examined it trivializes Williams’ position. For one can hardly argue for the priority of the bodily criterion by saying simply that specific psychological states are irrelevant to identity as long as the person maintains his consciousness, any more than one can establish the priority of the psychological criterion by saying that specific bodily states are irrelevant to identity as long as the person maintains his body.