Abstract
Lynne Rudder Baker’s Constitution View of human persons has come under much recent scrutiny. Baker argues that each human person is constituted by, but not identical to, a human animal. Much of the critical discussion of Baker’s Constitution View has focused upon this aspect of her account. Less has been said about the positive diachronic account of personal identity offered by Baker. Baker argues that it is sameness of what she labels ‘first-person perspective’ that is essential to understanding personal identity over time. Baker claims that her account avoids the commitment to indeterminacy of personal identity entailed by the psychological account. Further, the psychological account, but not her account, is plagued by what Baker labels the ‘duplication problem’. In the end, I argue that neither of these considerations forces us to renounce the psychological account and adopt Baker’s favored account.
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Notes
In criticizing the coherence of the constitution relation, it should be noted that Olson does appear to be implicitly attacking her diachronic account since such an account requires that the person be distinguished from the animal.
Baker (2000; 224) appears to agree given her claim that “any detailed development of the Mainstream Psychological View as a materialistic theory… will be forced to adopt the idea of constitution-without-identity.” (Shoemaker 2003) puts forward a constitution account that relies on the difference between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ properties. It should be noted as well that Baker’s proposal seems partially motivated by Eric Olson’s attack of Neo-Lockean psychological accounts, see (Olson 1997).
To avoid having to confront issues concerning the necessity of identity, we should here understand ‘Cobbler’ to abbreviate the following definite description (or some variant), ‘the person that wakes up in the house of a cobbler and has apparent memories of Prince’s experiences’.
I here ignore what whether there is a requirement on the type of cause underwriting the continuity in question.
I am guilty of further simplification here. Butler (1975) criticizes Locke and forced proponents of the psychological account to discard memory and develop the notion of ‘quasi-memory’ in order to fully spell-out a non-circular notion of psychological connectedness and continuity. Since non-circularity is not an issue here (Baker, as noted above, grants that her account is non-circular), I ignore this complication.
‘Cooper’ will also be used in place of a definite description. See fn. 4.
That is, there is no important, non-identity involving, relation that Prince bears to Cobbler that he does not bear to Cooper (and vice versa).
Baker here appears to be arguing that indeterminacy about personal identity over time is problematic because it conflicts with our intuitions about our own identities over time (i.e. the identity over time of persons). One might think that such indeterminacy should be eschewed due to the impossibility of indeterminate identity between any x and y. cf. (Evans 1978; Salmon 1982). (Baker 2007) reports agreement with Salmon and Evans.
An anonymous referee has suggested that Baker might, at this point, endorse Epistemicism by claiming that though (i) is true, we can’t know where the line is, and it is this lack of knowledge that gives rise to the appearance of genuine metaphysical indeterminacy. This is certainly an option, but I will raise three concerns. First, while this maneuver blocks SPECTRUM, appeal to Epistemicism alone does not address Parfit’s (1984; 239) contention that it is implausible that ‘the difference between life and death could just consist in any of the small differences’ that obtain between adjacent cases. Second, if my argument in the next paragraph is correct, a defender of the psychological account might also endorse Epistemicism. Finally, Baker (2000; 137) doesn’t appear to endorse this response when she states that if a fission product had my first-person perspective, then ‘I would know it.’
Thanks to an anonymous referee here for helping me see the importance of making this point.
The latter appears to be perhaps a colloquial expression of relative identity, which is of course distinct from indeterminate identity.
See (Brueckner 1993) for an argument that this is the path Parfit should have chosen.
Some might object that this is to do away with a positive aspect of Parfit’s approach. This may be so. However, by making such an objection, the objector is evincing disagreement with Baker’s approach. The aim here is to persuade those who wish to deny indeterminacy (i.e., those who agree with Baker that this putative aspect of her account would count in favor of her view) that the psychological approach is still a viable option.
See (Kim 1984) for full explication of global supervenience.
A further objection might be that the non-branching clause is both ad hoc and counter-intuitive. The charges are distinct, but related since whether a change made to save a theory is well motivated depends in part on the new theory and how well it comports with the evidence. If the new theory is counter-intuitive, and especially if the change in question has contributed to the counter-intuitiveness, then the alteration will feel forced. Thus, part of answering the ad hoc charge might include addressing the counter-intuitive charge. The next paragraph argues that Baker’s account may not fair much better than the psychological account with respect to the latter.
Cf. [Olson 1997].
Baker [2000; 124] comes close to advancing such an argument.
Thanks to an anonymous referee for comments and criticism that lead to drastic improvement of this section.
References
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Acknowledgements
I thank Lynne Rudder Baker and two anonymous referees for comments on earlier drafts.
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Buford, C. Baker on the Psychological Account of Personal Identity. Acta Anal 24, 197–209 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0056-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12136-009-0056-2