Knowledge and Reality: Personal Identity and Psychological Continuity

Choose one of the following passages and answer the following two questions about it:

(a) What is author’s argument in this passage?

(b) What might be a reasonable objection to this argument.

Passage 1: Our evil scientist is at it again, and causes Charles, a person today, to have the psychology of Guy Fawkes, a man hung in 1606 for trying to blow up the English Parliament. Of course, it might be difficult to tell whether Charles is faking, but if he really does have Fawkes’s psychology, then, Locke says, Charles is Guy Fawkes. So far, so good. But now our scientist perversely causes this transformation also to happen to another person, Robert. Coming to have Fawkes’s psychology is just an alteration to the brain; if it can happen to Charles, then it can happen to Robert as well. Locke’s theory is now in trouble. Both Charles and Robert are psychologically continuous with Fawkes. If personal identity is psychological continuity, then both Charles and Robert would be identical to Fawkes. But that makes no sense, since it would imply that Charles and Robert are identical to each other!

Conee and Sider, pp. 15-16

Passage 2: What I propose is this. First, A can think of any individual, anywhere in his “tree” as ”a descendant self.” This phrase implies psychological continuity. Similarly, any later individual can think of any earlier individual on the single path which connects him to A as “an ancestral self.” Since psychological continuity is transitive, “being an ancestral self of” and “being a descendant self of” are also transitive. To imply psychological connectedness I suggest the phrases “one of my future selves” and “one of my past selves.” These are the phrases with which we can describe Wiggins’ case. For having past and future selves is what we needed, a way of continuing to exist which does not imply identity through time. The original person does, in this sense, survive Wiggins’ operation: the two resulting people are his later selves. And they can each refer to him as “my past self.” (They can share a past self without being the same self as each other.) Since psychological connectedness is not transitive, and is a matter of degree, the relations “being a past self of” and “being a future self of” should themselves be treated as relations of degree.

Parfit. p. 44

Some pointers:

• Reading philosophy is hard. Don’t expect the answers to the questions to be obvious just from a quick reading of the text. Expect to have to read it several times. Expect to change your mind several times about exactly what your answers will be.

• 500 words is the overall word limit. You should decide for yourself how much of this space you devote to Question (a) and how much to Question (b). Sometimes it might be possible to explain an argument very quickly, in which case you’ll have a lot of room to consider objections. Sometimes it might be the other way around.

• When addressing Question (a) start by trying to identify the argument’s conclusion. Then ask yourself whether the author is attempting to present a deductively valid argument, or whether the argument has some other form. If it’s intended to be a deductively valid argument, you should be able to identify the premisses, and see why the author thinks the conclusion follows. If it’s an inference to the best explanation, you should be able to identify the phenomenon that the author’s favoured proposal is supposed to explain.

• In some cases, the passage presents a relatively self-contained argument. In others, the argument presented in the passage depends on claims that the author makes elsewhere in the text, so that rendering his or her reasoning explicit will require explaining those other claims. IN ALL CASES, UNDERSTANDING THE PASSAGE AND THE MATERIAL WELL ENOUGH TO ANSWER THE QUESTIONS WILL REQUIRE YOU TO LOOK AT THE WHOLE READING.

• When addressing Question (b), try to find the weak points in the argument. If you’ve decided that the author is attempting a deductively valid argument, ask yourself whether it really is valid. If it is valid, ask yourself whether its premisses are all true. If it’s not valid, ask yourself whether there is an obvious extra premiss that would be needed to make it valid, and whether that premiss is true. If it’s an inference to the best explanation, ask yourself whether the phenomenon that allegedly needs explanation is a genuine phenomenon, whether the proposal we’re being asked to accept is a good explanation, and whether there are other explanations equally good that the author hasn’t ruled out.