Abstract
In his famous essentialist account of identity, Kripke holds that it is necessary to the identity of individual people that they have the parents they do in fact have. Some have disputed this requirement, treating it either as a reason to reject essentialism or as something that should be eliminated in order to make essentialism stronger. I examine the reasoning behind some of these claims and argue that it fails to acknowledge the complex and multi-faceted importance of biological process in determining identity and distinguishing significant differences between biological and non-biological cases. In fact, this failure derives from an inherent tendency to treat the biological case in just the same way as the non-biological case at least at one important point in its history—the point of formation. This analysis offers a way of salvaging Kripke’s original claims. I focus in particular on the views of Graeme Forbes and Teresa Robertson, but also discuss the views of Nathan Salmon, M. S. Price and E. J. Lowe.
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Notes
See footnote 56, Kripke (1980: 114).
See Salmon (1979: 706), especially where he says Kripke's argument can be generalized by "letting A be the original component material … of some table B, whatever kind of material that may happen to be, and letting C be any distinct hunk of matter." He then goes on to suggest that sperm and egg can be treated in this way as collections of their component material and so the reasoning can apply to them. However, treating biological entities in this way (even if one adds their arrangement according to a "plan" as Salmon does) may be held to ignore a component of their origin—as biological entities themselves giving rise to a biological entity. A similar concern might be raised as to whether Kripke's use of the term "hunk" to describe the originating material for the table in question should be taken merely to mean collection of material. He does, after all, advise caution about the vagueness of "hunk", which, presumably would not be a concern if he intended it simply to mean the "collection" of the constituent material. He also talks about substance and composition in the following separate footnote. Perhaps, then, this footnote, about origin, should not be taken to be merely about the material composing the items discussed but rather about something more.
In more recent articles by Robertson and Forbes (2006) and others, this reductionism prompts concentration on the non-biological case to the exclusion of any investigation into the biological one.
See section 2 of Robertson and Atkins (2013).
He adapts this strategy from a counterexample attributed to Price (1982: 35).
It’s important to note that Forbes isn’t himself requiring that all the matter be the same, or indeed all the structure; he says that one must only require that those things not be very different (1986: 8). However, he is drawing the conclusion that, for any acceptable origin essentialism, nothing else could be involved but matter and configuration.
Salmon says something like this about Tables (1979: 723). The alternative he envisages is that if the tables in different possible worlds are to be different, it can only be because they differ in their bare haecceities. However, as we shall see, if the items are biological, any such difference in haecceity need not be bare or ungrounded, in Forbes' terms, because a difference in biological process will be involved. If there were a counterpart to biological process for the tables Salmon considers, then the same thing could be said there.
It is true that Forbes (2002, note 12) acknowledges a significant difference between biological and non-biological cases and uses it to comment on Ship of Theseus examples. However, in his discussion, any connection he makes with the crucial importance of biological process for individual identity in the biological case seems sensitive only to process in later development rather than in formation itself.
The line of descent extends beyond the generation of this entity. Suppose one were to imagine a different possible world in which Alpop and Almom do not exist because, say, their two sets of parents never had children. In such a world, then, could one perhaps say that Twin Alpop and Twin Almom respectively are, in fact, Alpop and Almom, if they are imagined to be materially and formally identical to Alpop and Almom in the actual world? If so, then wouldn't the original bar to saying that Twin Al was Al be removed? The trouble with saying this, however, is that we then have the same problem with the identities of Twin Alpop and Twin Almom that we had earlier with Twin Al. If Twin Al in the original possible world scenario could not be Al because Twin Al did not have the parents of Al as parents, then, in this imagined possible world, Twin Alpop could not be Alpop and Twin Almom could not be Almom because they do not have the same parents as actual Alpop and actual Almom, respectively. Therefore, since Twin Al is not the child of Alpop and Almom, he cannot be Al in this possible world. This reasoning can clearly be iterated as required. The only way to have Al in a possible world is by having his actual line of descent in that possible world.
This is true even though we might be tempted to say that Twin Alzy is, in some sense, the same cell (though it would be better to say: the same cellular material arrangement) as Alzy. This conception of “cell” would be better labeled as a temporal “cell stage” in a kind of Quinean sense of “stage.” But identity of temporal cell stage does not guarantee identity of cell, as is clear from the discussion of recycling and reconstitution of the same temporal stage in the discussion of the recycling problem in the next section.
Another way to conceive of a counterexample is this. Imagine a possible world in which Alpop and Almom exist on earth at the same time as Twin Alpop and Twin Almom exist on Twin Alearth. They are respectively genomically and formally identical (Alpop with Twin Alpop and Almom with Twin Almom) but made up of different atoms. Now imagine that Alpop and Almom give birth to a son Al by way of the zygote Alzy, a union of their sperm and egg, while Twin Alpop and Twin Almom do not conceive. Now imagine another possible world identical to that one except that Alpop and Almom never conceive but Twin Alpop and Twin Almom do conceive and produce a son, Twin Al, by way of a zygote, Twin Alzy, which is formally and materially identical to Alzy in the other possible world. Analogous reasoning would then produce an argument that Twin Alzy is not Alzy and Twin Al is not Al, which is contrary to the matter-configuration principle of identity.
This would be something like what Price (1982) imagines when she imagines that the parents of Queen Elizabeth II do not conceive (nor even produce the relevant gametes) but resort to biological engineering to produce a zygote materially and formally indistinguishable from the zygote from which the Queen actually developed (Price 1982: 35). I believe Price's counterexample, although widely accepted, does not work.
Notice also that this suggests there might be significance in a difference in how the biological engineering of a fabricated zygote took place. Indirect biological engineering that resulted in cells that then produced the zygote in an organic process might be significantly different in an identity-relevant way from the direct engineering of the zygote itself. In his discussion of these different cases, Forbes does not see any such significant difference.
As Forbes says, “in the sense of predecessor that means, when x is a propagule [a zygote is a propagule], having the same matter configured in the same way” (2002: 328).
In the ordinary case for humans (where parents are involved), the precursors involved would be the parents, so precursor descent would amount to the parental requirement. In cases of indirect biological engineering, the precursors involved would be cells that were biologically engineered to produce the zygote.
Robertson (1998, pp. 744–745). On p. 745, she writes of the argument she uses against Forbes, “… the argument requires the rejection of strong origin essentialism, the view that it is essential to an organism to come from the very propagules from which it actually arose …”.
He later qualifies these “in a modest way” (2002: 320) as necessary to allow for predecessor essentialism.
In the ordinary case these would be the actual gametes that produce the actual zygote that develops into the mature individual.
Indeed, without this essentially diachronic and temporally extended nature, there would be no reason to hold that there can be identity in the face of substantive material alteration over time, as is possible in the case of any developing organism. Moreover, the entity being talked about is not, after all, a mere temporal stage that exists on its own without any underlying process binding the stages together as part of its being.
He means it “in the sense of predecessor that means … having the same matter configured in the same way” (2002: 328).
If indeed species are to be taken to be natural kinds and to operate, in the Kripkean way, like names, then this descent, or some part of it, would be necessary to individual species.
This last observation provides material for an answer to a question that Lowe (2007: 288) raises about Adam. That question was: would the case of an Adam—the first human being—raise a difficulty for parental or precursor descent? Lowe suggests that the parental requirement would either lead to an infinite regress or become problematic upon consideration of the case of an Adam—the first human being. For that reason among others, he rejects essential origins. But his concerns can be addressed. One can say, first, that there was in fact no Adam in the biblical sense; and, second, for any identifiable ‘first human’, ancestral origin would still play an essential role in identity. Even if the parents are not human, they are still the individual’s parents. (This necessary line of descent would extend even to remote origins involving asexual reproduction and thus only a single progenitor.) Lowe puts great store in the purported difficulty of any such first human’s being unique in this way. Shouldn’t all humans be one way? But of course, that would only seem a requirement if one were presuming an account of individual identity to follow conceptual lines involving a priori necessity. Kripke’s account, however, explicitly involves a posteriori necessity having to do with the nature of the relevant item and is therefore responsive to scientific discovery of distinctive features of evolutionary development, including those pertaining to change involving the origin of species.
See the discussion of Forbes on intrinsic features in the previous section. I wish to thank an anonymous reviewer for encouraging me to elaborate my argument here.
References
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Sartorelli, J. Biological process, essential origin, and identity. Philos Stud 173, 1603–1619 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0570-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-015-0570-6