A Study On Personal Identity

Personal identity is mainly about the persistence of persons,and there are three basic positions at present:the mental-entity views establish personal identity on the basis of the identity of mental entities;the physical-continuity views make personal identity judgments based on brain criteria or body criteria;the psychological-continuity views reduce personal identity to mental-causal continuity.The psychological-continuity views are in fact developed from Locke's theory of personal identity,so they are also called“Neo-Lockeanism”.This paper explores the internal logic of development from Locke's theory of personal identity to Neo-Lockeanism,trying to find their problems and the way out.Although the concept of person and the inquiry into soul date back to the ancient Greece and Rome,personal identity became a question since Locke.Locke clearly put forward that identity is related to concepts.Then he distinguished“man”and“person”.The criterion of the identity of man is life-continuity,while the criterion of the identity of person is self-consciousness.Self-consciousness is a kind of reflective perception that“perceives oneself as oneself”and“recognizes oneself as oneself in different times and places”.A person is identical with the agent of a past behavior only if he is self-aware of that behavior.Neo-Lockeanism also underlines a person's psychological continuity with the agent of a past behavior.However,since Locke mainly aimed to solve the problem of the justice of the Last Judgment,“self-consciousness”is fundamentally different from“psychological continuity”.The latter is an empirical concept,while the former has both empirical and rational color.Self-consciousness is inseparable from psychological experience such as memories,but also highlights the ontological status of selves.In fact,it was through constant interpretations of self-consciousness that the Neo-Lockean theories of personal identity were developed.There are three interpretations of Locke's concept of self-consciousness,namely the memory interpretation,the appropriation interpretation and the causal interpretation.In order to defend the mental-entity view of theology,Butler and Reid adopted a memory interpretation and put forward the circularity refutation and the non-transitivity refutation.Combining memory interpretation with a linguistic analysis,contemporary philosopher Flew pointed out that each possible meaning of the memory criterion faces at least one of the following problems.First,the problem of paramnesia,namely that a person's apparent memory may be based on other person's real experience rather than his own.The second is circularity.Paramnesia can be excluded by redefinition,but thus,memory,with the presupposition of personal identity,could no longer serve as the criterion of the latter,otherwise there would be a circularity.The third is amnesia,which leads to the break of the memory chain and makes personal identity show the non-transitivity that identity does not have.Flew also put forward a dualism refutation,accusing Locke of emphasizing the psychological aspects alone.Since there is a straw man fallacy,the memory interpretation criticizes Locke unfairly,and it's abandoned finally.From the perspective of moral philosophy,Behan puts forward the attribution interpretation,taking self-consciousness as the consciousness that appropriates events as one's moral possessions.A natural man in physic due to moral appropriation becomes a moral man in practic,with his moral possessions constituting a“self”from the first-person perspective and a“person”from the third-person perspective.This interpretation highlights the first-person authority of personal identity.It also faces the underlying refutations of circularity,non-transitivity,and dualism.According to Hughes'causal interpretation,what Locke really emphasized is not the memory statements,but the real base of their formation.The psychological association between persons can be explained as a causal system,thus the problems of amnesia,paramnesia,circularity,and branching cases,can all be solved by empirical research and causal analyses.It is the causal interpretation that brings out the Neo-Lockean concept of psychological continuity.However,the concept of psychological continuity and the Neo-Lockean personal ontology have gone through a development process,so the Neo-Lockean theories of personal identity have exhibited different forms from the beginning.Early Neo-Lockeanist Quinton emphasized the importance and independence of the mental,and constructed an empirical concept of soul,using“soul phase”to represent the instantaneous overall of the mental,while using“the ordered set of soul phases”to represent the essence of a person.This ontology of four-dimensionalism is one of the key factors leading Neo-Lockeanists to“direct psychological continuity”,“indirect psychological continuity”,or similar concepts.By constructing“quasi-memory”and“quasi_c-memory”,Shoemaker concludes that the witness condition of remembering is not caused by our definition of memory,but has deep roots in epistemology:the formation of memories has causal conditions,otherwise all language and knowledge--which are based on identity--would be impossible.Parfit reduces personal identity to psychological continuity which is richer than memory and points out that the branching cases shows that the criterion of personal identity is psychological continuity rather than logical identity.Lewis gives full play to four-dimensionalism and constructs concepts such as“person stage”,“continuant person”,“R-relation”,and“I-relation”,so as to reveal the deep internal relations between psychological continuity and logical identity.However,in the opinion of Wiggins,four-dimensionalism will lead to the failure of application of many psychological predicates.In order to truly solve the problems of amnesia,paramnesia,circularity,and branching cases,Neo-Lockeanism must be supported by the body criterion,recognizing that psychological continuity,as the nominal essence of person,comes from its real essence--homo sapiens.It can be said that Neo-Lockeanism was generated in the attempts to solve the problems faced by Locke's view.Neo-Lockeanists replace“self-consciousness”with“direct and indirect psychological continuity”and thus solve the non-transitivity refutation related to amnesia.Shoemaker solves the circularity refutation appealing to the causal condition and witness condition of remembering.This is similar to Wiggins'solution that adds the physical criterion.For in practice,the attribution of psychological phenomena cannot ignore the physical body in which the mental phenomena occur.But at the same time,Neo-Lockeanists also faces some new problems.The ontology of four-dimensionalism makes it more possible for the psychological continuity chain to branch,then leads to the replica problem,which is obscure in Locke's theory of personal identity.This problem is rooted in the contradiction between the formal characteristics of identity and Leibniz's law.It cannot be avoided by any reductive view of personal identity,but it's not a problem in practice:by adjusting the predicate system used to describe phenomena,we can always distinguish replicas,and when we cannot,there is usually no practical significance to do so.The internal-external dualism dilemma inherited from Locke is more difficult for Neo-Lockeanists.It cannot be solved by adding body criterion or adopting a body criterion purely.For the body criterion(and Locke's concept of man),which is based on the third-person external perspective,undermines the first-person authority of personal identity,while psychological criterion(and Locke's concept of person),which is based on the first-person internal perspective,highlights the first-person authority of personal identity too much.There a similar debate on first-person authority in Internalism vs.Externalism in the philosophy of mind.Its way out is to interpret the meaning of words radically according to the history of the individual,and to achieve a dynamic balance between the objectivity and subjectivity of language finally.Similarly,a prescription for Neo-Lockeanism is taking the first-person judgment of personal identity as an important reference that can be wrong,making causal analyses dynamically in practice,and adjusting constantly the temporary third-person judgment of personal identity.Thus,the replica problem and the dualism dilemma faced by Locke and Neo-Lockeanism are essentially the contradiction between“numerous empirical facts about persons”and“the metaphysical characteristics of identity”.By adjusting constantly the boundary of the possibility of language according to the empirical facts obtained in practice,and conducting causal analyses and personal identity judgments dynamically,we will find the way out of both.