Abstract
The vast majority of philosophers of personal identity since John Locke have been convinced that the persistence of persons is not grounded in bodily continuity. Why? As numerous ‘textbooks’ on personal identity attest, their conviction rests, to a large extent, on an objection to the bodily approach, which concerns episodic memory. The objection invites us to a thought experiment in which we meet a person who experientially remembers events from the past of a person with a different body. The nature of such first-personal memory-links is viewed as strongly suggesting that the rememberer is identical with the remembered, and hence, given the possibility of such a case, as suggesting that a person can transgress its bodily limits. The memory objection is as influential as it gets in the metaphysics of personal identity. Textbooks often portray it as the starting point of the contemporary debate about personal identity. And it has been widely perceived as a success. As everyone who has taught an introductory course on personal identity knows, the recognition of episodic-memory links in body-switching cases has the power to turn any group of novice students against bodily criteria of personal identity. In this essay, I shall specify and undermine the memory objection. I shall attempt to establish two theses. The first thesis (Sects. 1, 2) is that the memory objection is only viable if construed as resting on the view that episodic memory contains a sense of personal identity, which teaches us about the reality of personal identity. The second thesis (Sects. 3, 4) is that there is no such sense of personal identity, that episodic memory teaches us nothing at all about personal identity.
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Notes
For an extended discussion of the bodily approach and references, see Olson (1997).
If psychological and biological continuity both obtain, it is more or less trivial that personal identity obtains, but it is hard to tell which type of continuity personal persistence (if grounded at all) consists in. Since in most everyday cases there is no divergence between psychological and biological continuity, these are useless as tie-breakers.
For discussion of this issue, see, inter alia, Recanati (2007: part 5).
In the case of first-personal cognitive access to someone else’s experience in the past, some prefer to speak of quasi-memory-access. I do not. More on the notion of quasi-memory in n. 9.
Notice that factual reflexivity in this sense does not settle the question whether the subject of the memory is also identical with the subject of the perception from which the memory derives, as the subject of the perception is to be distinguished from the centre of the perceived event. Assuming, in addition to the factual reflexivity of episodic memory, that in typical cases a perception is also factually reflexive, in that the subject of the perception is identical with the perceived event’s centre, then it follows that episodic memory typically traces a causal link between the memory state of a subject and a past perception of the same subject.
In the literature on memory and identity, past-directed experiential states lacking factual reflexivity are often called quasi-memories—q-memories, for short—though this is not the only notion of q-memory in play in familiar discussions (see below for a different notion). (The label ‘quasi-memory’ was introduced by Shoemaker 1970). I shall have no need for this factual notion of q-memory, as I shall be happy to speak of factually non-reflexive memories.
This thesis about the presence of an identification-component in overall memory-content must not be read as presupposing any substantive account of criteria of self-identification, such as the demanding criteria that Evans (1982) associates with identification-components. Specifically, to discern an identification-component in memory is not automatically to hold that this component is separable from all other components. Whether such separability obtains is a further issue, to be addressed below.
Lockean opponents to the bodily approach face, for instance, the well-known problem of fission and the too-many-thinkers problem, though there is the issue of whether the fission problem arises for the bodily approach, as well. See Olson (2002/2017) for references.
See Pollock (1987) for the notion of an undermining defeater.
The second type of doubt points towards non-reflexivism, which is the denial of reflexivism. Non-reflexivists are hard to find in the literature. I read Velleman (1996) as developing a form of non-reflexivism about episodic memory, by recourse to Williams’ (1973) discussion of imagining being someone else.
I am here making the now-common assumption that grounding, or constitution, backs non-causal explanations.
I am here making the standard assumption that grounding, and hence metaphysical explanation, implies necessity.
This version of deflationary reflexivism may be called narrow, in contrast to broad deflationary reflexivism, according to which the identification component in memory-content is completely grounded in the basic components, while the perspectival component plays only a partial or even no explanatory role. I mention the broad version only to set it aside. A serious problem with this alternative is that the event-component and the pastness-component in the overall contents of episodic memories do not seem to be relevant for explaining the identification-component. It is prima facie plausible to expect, as the narrow deflationary reflexivist does, that a subject S’s representation of a sunrise from the point of view of C explains S’s representation of C as identical with herself. But why should S’s representation of a sunrise as having certain non-perspectival qualitative attributes, for example as undergoing a certain change in shape or colour, be relevant for explaining the presence of S, as opposed to someone else, in the event? What does the non-perspectival shape of an event have to do with who experienced it? Similarly, why should the representation of the sunrise as past be relevant for explaining who experienced it? As I cannot see why these aspect should have any explanatory relevance at all, I shall, henceforth, focus on the narrow version when I speak of deflationary reflexivism.
While factual q-memory is free of factual reflexivity, representational q-memory is free of representational reflexivity. Unfortunately, discussions of q-memory are occasionally unclear on whether failure of factual reflexivity or of representational reflexivity or of both are under consideration. I shall focus on the latter sort.
While my way of distinguishing between deflationary and robust reflexivism is not a standard one, I read Parfit (1984) and Klein and Nichols (2012), inter alia, as robust reflexivists, and I read Schechtman (1990), inter alia, as a deflationary reflexivist. The issue whether there is a distinctive phenomenal sense of ownership in memory is in many ways similar to the issue whether there is a distinctive phenomenal sense of bodily ownership. See, inter alia, the recent exchange between Bermúdez (2013, 2015) and de Vignemont (2013).
While I have directed this reliability objection against narrow deflationary reflexivism, it also applies to broad deflationary reflexivism. For if the identification component rests entirely on the basic, non-reflexive components in memory-content—no matter which exact explanatory role the perspective-component plays here—then the sense of personal identity cannot be trusted to deliver information about facts of personal identity, since the basic components obviously fail to provide information about facts of personal identity. We saw that Brownson’s representation of an event from Brown’s first-personal point of view is neutral on whether Brownson is Brown. The representation of an event as a having a certain (tenseless and non-perspectival) qualitative profile, and the representation of an event as past are similarly neutral on questions of personal identity. We do not learn anything about the reality of personal identity on this basis.
Since R.B.’s states are still factually reflexive, he does not have factual q-memories.
For comments on the material presented in this paper I am indebted to Adrian Alsmith, Sven Bernecker, Valerio Buonomo, Carl Craver, Brendan de Kenessey, Bahadir Eker, Matti Eklund, Kevin Mulligan, François Recanati, Katia Samoilova, Alex Skiles, an anonymous referee, and audiences at the University of Milan, at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Tuebingen, at GAP.9 in Osnabrueck, and at the first eidos graduate school at the University of Neuchâtel.
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Sattig, T. The Sense and Reality of Personal Identity. Erkenn 83, 1139–1155 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9933-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10670-017-9933-z