The assumption running through these controversies is, simply put, that there are facts about the matter waiting to be discovered and described by a true theory of personal identity. Epistemic inaccessibility is to blame: we have no good reason to believe that there is any real theory of personal identity. The epistemic diagnosis claims that the real problem afflicting the disputes is that we cannot tell which theory of personal identity is correct.
Our objects of analysis are not the same: the semantic diagnostician is talking about the nature of disputes over personal identity; With enough prodding, the classic questions about personal identity—questions about the metaphysical nature of people—eventually emerge in this way. If so, we're just waiting to discover the right criteria for personality and perseverance.
We have just examined MO in the metaphysics of personal identity—how the default assumption plays out in the default disputes between standard accounts. For reasons that we will see, I find the alternative diagnoses - just-more-work, the semantic and the nihilistic - unconvincing.
The point of personal identity, via a thought experiment
I defend the view that while matters of personal identity are themselves semantic phenomena, the reason for "all the fuss"—for the intractability of the disputes—is fundamentally epistemic, not semantic. If we cannot say that there is any fact of the matter about personal identity, what are we to think about our ordinary claims, intuitions, and practices involving the concept of "person." On the question of the grounds of personhood — in terms of what an entity counts as a person.
19 Determining changes in our basic psychology may also be necessary to make this S-world setup seem plausible. 21 At least because of the queer view described, it is plausible to say that the date and place of birth are facts that refer to human organisms and not to people. Some of us who are more serious about it worry about the practical implications of the possibility that we are never—or, more precisely, not at two different points in time—the same person.
Qualitative identity is the type of relationship found between identical twins: similarity based on the fact that twin 1 and twin 2 have something in common. philosophers have thought that personal identity through time or persistence is numerical identity.). We have just looked at one dilemma of personal identity - one of the millions or billions, probably, that are pondered and negotiated daily in the S-world. 25 The answer depends on how realistically we model the entire S-world and its possible futures.
First, the presumptive status of ordinary claims about personal identity makes us feel warranted in judging S-World-type claims inadmissible. One of them is sociolinguistic: we need some kind of common conceptual scheme and vocabulary (that is, those centered on the concept "person") to cope with the theoretical burden of many things - actions, rights, responsibilities, obligations, power, etc. This proves, in my opinion, the flexibility of the "person" concept: it does what we want.
So far what I have done is outline what is meant by the general concept.
Metametaphysical trouble on the horizon
After all, the standard philosophical accounts of personal identity – PV and BV – purport to tell us the facts of the matter; How can we know if any of those stories are right? These three criteria can play a role in our judgment about which theory of personal identity, and thus which claims about the metaphysics of humans, are most likely to be correct. What is at stake in such a judgment is difficult to overestimate, because the theory we take to be correct about a given subject tells us what we normally take to be facts about that subject – as the expression goes: “the fact of the matter".
And for a claim to be a fact, according to a typical understanding31, it is consistent with the way things actually are in the world or part of the world. Can the three theory selection criteria help us figure out which of the standard accounts of personal identity is likely to be right. 32 Some include retrodiction—the ability of a theory to account for or "reverse-predict" past events.
BV's defender answers yes, he is the same person, as he has kept his body. Now it may be the case that what makes it true is the way certain metaphysical facts are – namely, that the world is such that there is a deep, essential difference between sockness and personhood. I won't make an argument here to push back; but if you are unmoved so far, here is the second concern.
Here the paradigm demonstration is Williams's "The Self and the Future" (1970), where the intuition, on the basis of apparently insignificant factors, hesitates between the conclusions - between whether PV or BV is right. Each iteration's narration results in conflicting results: the third-person version encourages the intuition that something like PV is true (a "mentalistic" conclusion, Williams calls it), and the first-person narration encourages the intuition that something like BV ("the bodily continuity identification") is right. The three types of theory selection criteria—empirical adequacy, intuition, and the theoretical virtues—have all failed to tell us which of the standard accounts is likely to be correct.
Even if this temptation is misguided—and I think it actually is, as we will see in §4—the equal fit of both theories with the empirical evidence means that just like PV and BV, realism and nihilism suffer from empirical equivalence. While the scientifically well-informed realist about humans is forced to assert that there are at least two kinds of entities in the world—humans and more fundamental building blocks of matter (eg quantum fields)—the nihilist clings to the strictly fundamental-physical picture, on which only simples exist. If it is true, as I suggested in §3.2, that theoretical virtues fail to track truth—and indeed, we have no evidence that they do—then theoretical virtues cannot tell us whether realism or nihilism is probably not right.
The semantic diagnosis: are the disputes “merely verbal”?
Eli Hirsch says that we can say that a dispute is purely verbal if “there are two indisputable sentences U1 and U2, one true and one false, such that one side thinks that [a disputable sentence] D is (a priori necessarily ) equivalent to U1 and the other party thinks that D is equivalent to U2". Most realists who accept one standard theory or another in modern physics will agree with the nihilist that there are simple things arranged according to the person, so let's try to define it as the true indisputable sentence U1 held by the nihilist. It cannot be "There are people," because that is already the disputable sentence D, and it is not indisputably false.
Nor can it be "There are no people," because the realist would not maintain such a claim (nor is it unquestionably false). There are particulars arranged personwise,” and conditions (for reasons of charity, if anything) that D and U1 are equivalent. It still cannot be "There are people" since that is disputed by the nihilist and it is not undisputedly false.
Nor can it be "There are no people." And given that the stock of available sentences that each side can maintain is extremely limited, we don't seem to have any plausible permutations of sentence designation left. This should already give us pause: the dispute between the realist and the nihilist is not "merely verbal" (in the Hirschian sense). For example, the proponent of PV could claim, "There are psychological features," without opposition from his opponent.
Note that we will encounter problems if we try to polish the statement; a sentence like "There are psychological traits that matter to personality" will be disputed by BV's defender.). There are psychological traits” or “Personality is achieved by virtue of having certain essential traits” as U1, we immediately encounter a problem: U1 will clearly not be a priori and necessarily equivalent to D. In the case of “There are psychological traits ” , it’s not even in the end ballpark.
Persistence is achieved on the basis of certain essential characteristics.” But no conceivable contested sentence D appears to be a priori and necessarily equivalent to any of these propositions.
What should we say?
It should be flexible and general enough to accommodate the inconsistent and changing ways we talk about people in social, legal, political and other contexts. LOCAL PRAGMATISM ABOUT PERSON: Given any context C and any time ϕ, x is a person if and only if the predicate "is a person". LOCAL PRAGMATISM ON INSISTENCE: Given any context C and whenever ϕ, x at t1 and y at t2 are the same person if and only if the predicate "is the same person" is applicable to ‹x, y› at ‹C, ϕ› .
And rather attractively, looking at the metaphysics of men in this measured way helps us to keep in mind what is at stake here: the fact that our meaning-making practices ultimately make of us what counts and what does not count. as a person, what counts as the same person over time, and so on. If, after centuries of clever argument, the standard disputes over personal identity have failed to yield a conclusion, what are we to make of philosophers who insist on continuing the debate. We may decide to say that their efforts are questionable; but a more charitable and promising way of looking at what they are doing is in terms of "metalinguistic negotiation": normative disagreement over how the concept and word "person" should be used (Plunkett & Sundell 2013; Plunkett 2015; Thomasson 2016).
