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A Humean Argument for Personal Identity

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Metaphysica

Abstract

Considering various arguments in Hume’s Treatise, I reconstruct a Humean argument against personal identity or unity. According to this argument, each distinct perception is separable from the bundle of perceptions to which it belongs and is thus transferable either to the external, material reality or to another psychical reality, another bundle of perceptions. Nevertheless, such transference (Hume’s word!) is entirely illegitimate, otherwise Hume’s argument against causal inference would have failed; furthermore, it violates private, psychical accessibility. I suggest a Humean thought experiment clearly demonstrating that, to the extent that anything within a psychical reality is concerned, no distinction leads to separation or transference and that private, psychical accessibility has to be allowed in the Humean argument for personal identity or unity. Private accessibility and psychical untransferability secure personal identity and unity. Referring to the phenomenon of multiple personality along the lines of the Humean argument for personal identity or unity, I illustrate both private accessibility and a possible notion of one and the same person distinct from his/her alters or psychical parts. Finally, I show why Parfit’s Humean argument against personal identity must fail.

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Notes

  1. Although thought is necessarily private and untransferable, it is interpersonally, intersubjectively communicable by linguistic or other means. I have attempted to show this on the grounds of the universal relationality, on which language and translation supervene, of any psychical being (see Gilead 1999, pp. 16–22, 48–49, 83–84, 120, 134–135, 140–141; Gilead 2003, especially pp. 14–16, 47–51, 70–73, 82–84, and 87–89).

  2. See Gilead 2003 for a systematic elaboration of this issue.

  3. Cf. Treatise, I, iii, 12, pp. 184, 188, 190; 13, pp. 197–198.

  4. See Berman 1981; Lilienfeld 1995, pp. 170–194; Wilkes 1988; Braude 1991; Dennett 1991; Hacking 1995.

  5. Consider, for instance, Elster 1986; Parfit 1987; Zemach 1992, pp. 167–200.

  6. My answers (Gilead 2003, pp. 77–95) are integrated within a novel modal metaphysics of mine, entitled “panenmentalism”; the principles of which are introduced in Gilead 1999.

  7. See Penelhum’s (2000, pp. 121–23) analysis of this passage. Penelhum mentions “my own sense of my own inner life, of myself as the bearer of comparable experiences. It is here set against the idea of the other as the bearer of his or her distinct but presumably similar life-experiences” (ibid., p. 122). Yet, he seriously doubts whether the “special access” that one has to one’s own perceptions may really lessen Hume’s attack on the metaphysical self in Treatise I, iv, 6 (ibid.). I think that the converted Humean argument defeats that attack.

  8. Although Parfit finds Hume’s view inadequate, he defends “a view that, in the relevant aspects, follows Hume” (Parfit 1987, p. 139). The inadequacy Parfit mentions has to do mainly with the ethical, moral, and psychological implications of Hume’s metaphysical view on personal identity, which is basically quite close to Parfit’s. Sydney Shoemaker refers to the analogy with Hume’s argument, “except that Parfit never suggests that there is anything ‘fictional’ about personal identity” (Shoemaker 1997, p. 138). Of special interest is Shoemaker’s response to Hume’s problem of personal unity and identity (Shoemaker 1996).

  9. Shoemaker criticizes Parfit over this matter on quite different grounds: “it will be impossible to have a reduction of personhood and personal identity without having a reduction of mentality as well—the impersonal description will have to be in physical or functional terms” (ibid., p. 139). This is indeed one of the troubles with Parfit’s impersonal description, and it may reflect on Hume too (see ibid.).

  10. Distinguishing and separating internal (psychical) entities or objects from external (physical or material) ones, Hume makes clear that each perception or other psychical entity “may exist, and yet be no where” (Treatise I, iv, 5, p. 284), and that “all our perceptions are not susceptible of a local union, either with what is extended or unextended” (ibid., p. 298). This is certainly compatible with the converted Humean argument but by no means with Parfit’s view.

  11. Simon Blackburn’s analysis is especially interesting as to the analogy with Hume’s argument as well as to the question whether Kant’s counterargument also refutes Parfit’s argument (Blackburn 1997, pp. 183–191).

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Correspondence to Amihud Gilead.

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Gilead, A. A Humean Argument for Personal Identity. Int Ontology Metaphysics 9, 1–16 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12133-007-0018-3

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