Abstract
It is intuitive to suppose that the question of whether I persist through a given period will always have a metaphysically substantive ‘yes’ or ‘no’ answer. Derek Parfit challenges this intuition. Given the truth of Reductionism, he argues, identity can be indeterminate. The main argument Parfit marshals in support of this claim employs his Sorites-style Combined Spectrum thought experiment. Despite its influence, there are conspicuous gaps in his argument. Notably, he claims that identity is indeterminate when questions about persistence are ‘empty’. But indeterminacy in Sorites puzzles is traditionally held to result from vagueness – a topic Parfit avoids. Without an account of the relationships between vagueness, indeterminacy, and question-emptiness, his argument remains incomplete. I begin by outlining Parfit’s argument as it stands. I then propose that we can provide the missing details by supplementing Parfit’s treatment of the Combined Spectrum with Sider’s notion of nonsubstantivity. This gives us a clearer understanding of Parfit’s indeterminacy claim, and affords the room to accommodate vagueness in his argument. Once we spell out what this means, however, it becomes clear that a more radical conclusion is justified by Parfit’s reasoning: it is always an empty question whether a person persists.
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Notes
By ‘empirical’ I mean discoverable through observation or introspection.
Parfit’s Combined Spectrum thought experiment is an analogue of Chisholm’s (1967). Chisholm is interested in trans-world identity – that is, what makes person p1 in possible world W1 the same person as p2 in W2. The modified argument I develop in this paper might, with some alterations, be applied to the possible worlds question.
Parfit actually only mentions that the Cartesian Non-Reductionist is able to claim there is a sharp borderline (1987: 293), but as shown, this claim is also available on the Further Fact View.
That is not to say a Cartesian must hold that there is a sharp borderline. They will if they think that the existence of an ego is always all-or-nothing, and that the Ego persists through some operations but not others. But they might instead think that egos are ontically vague entities (more on that later). Or they might think the Ego persists through all, or none of the operations. In either case, the Cartesian would not posit a sharp borderline. The point, though, is that, unlike the Reductionist, they at least have the option to posit one.
Alternatively, the Further Fact theorist might hold that in some cases it is neither true nor false that p1 survives, and that this fact of indeterminacy is brute. Again, the point is that, unlike the Reductionist, the Further Fact theorist could posit a sharp borderline.
Parfit runs these two claims together elsewhere, e.g. ‘It is not true that our identity is always determinate. I can always ask, ‘Am I about to die?’ But it is not true that, in every case, this question must have an answer, which must be either Yes or No. In some cases this would be an empty question.’ (1987: 216–7, emphasis added).
As I use the expression, a semantic candidate is ‘metaphysically privileged’ when it carves at the joints of nature better than all other candidates.
See e.g. Goodenough 1996 for related criticism.
This answers a separate concern one might have about (ii). (ii) claims that (a) and (b) are false. The falsity of (a) and (b) means that some questions will be nonsubstantive, and some will have indeterminate answers. This leaves the logical possibility of mutual exclusivity – i.e. that all nonsubstantive questions will have determinate answers, and all indeterminate answers will be answers to substantive questions, and no nonsubstantive questions have indeterminate answers. I do not consider this possibility for the reasons above: if a question is nonsubstantive, it can have indeterminate answers.
The task of choosing between the different accounts would be a project in itself. Moreover, it is not even clear that we need to choose between the three types listed. The list might not be exhaustive for one thing, and the different types of vagueness might not be mutually exclusive (Williams 2008).
The epistemicists are yet to provide an account of the connection between meaning and use. But, Williamson argues, ‘[s]ince no one knows what such an account would look like, the epistemic view of vagueness should not be singled out for its failure to provide one’ (1992: 157).
One might attempt to resist this unintuitive conclusion by arguing that some candidates do carve better than others: those towards the near end of the spectrum. The problem with this is that, if a candidate carves better the closer it is to the near end, then the candidate in the nearest case will carve best of all. As such, the nearest case would be the only case with a metaphysically privileged candidate. But that would mean that it was substantively true that p1 survives only the very first case on the spectrum. Since the very first case on the spectrum would be one with no empirical change whatsoever, this would deliver the conclusion that it is substantively true that persons cannot survive any empirical change. This response would then end up with a more unintuitive conclusion than the one it set out to avoid.
That is not to say a Reductionist cannot provide an informative answer to the question. A Reductionist’s answer will be informative insofar as it tells us something about the concept or linguistic candidate they employ.
Brueckner is comparing the two ways of describing an outcome of an empty question. What he says for descriptions goes equally well for the two schemes I am comparing.
See Prosser (2016: 183) for a similar claim about a perceptual system that represents objects as enduring rather than perduring.
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Pollock, H. Death by Redescription. Philosophia 51, 309–328 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00327-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-021-00327-5