Literally Like/1

Literally Like a Different Person: Context and Concern in Personal Identity

Introduction

It is not the case that there is only one literal sense of

“same person.” When presented in different contexts, “she is/is

not the same person,” can have different answers concerning the

same entity or set of entities across the same period of time.

This is because:

1. Persons are composed of many parts, and different parts have

different persistence conditions. This follows from a

reductionist view of the self.

2. When we ask about sameness of persons, or “personal

identity,” we are asking because of certain practical

concerns.

3. Different concerns will look to the persistence of different

parts of the person for criteria of sameness.

4. No single criterion of sameness tracks all concerns.

Literally Like/2

By combining reductionism with contextualism, the disparate

answers to the personal identity question can be clarified

without losing the practical concerns motivating them. The

seeming conflict between physicalist and psychological accounts

is resolved by showing that each references subsets of person-

parts relevant for particular concerns. Nor do we need to confine

some clear forms of loss of personhood, such as total brain-wipe,

to “ways of speaking” or metaphor in order to keep others, such

as bodily survival, literal, because each answers to different,

literal senses of “person” tied to different sets of underlying

elements. Further, the “conflicting intuitions” that have people

in Shaun Nichols’ survey (Nichols, 2010, pg. 35, based on

Williams’ (1973, pg. 52) question about identity after memory

loss) saying that they would not “persist” without memory, but

would still feel pain, can be resolved by seeing that these two

questions advert to different senses of personal continuity,

calling for the continuation of different sets of person-

elements.

While “[i]dentity cannot be a matter of degree …personal

identity may be a matter of degree,” as David Lewis notes (1976,

Literally Like/3

pg 32), or, as Derek Parfit claims, survival is not “all-or-

nothing” (1984, pg 341). This is because the collection of parts

constituting a person undergoes continuous change, and at some

point enough parts have changed, and enough have stayed the same

that understanding the specific purpose for asking about sameness

will be required to determine which parts to attend to.

Importantly, here “personal identity” is, as Lewis notes, not

simply identity in its numerical sense. Some of the confusion in

discussions of sameness of persons over time comes from

linguistic confusion brought about by the use of “identity” in

the term “personal identity.” Personal identity has to do with,

among other things, roles, personae, self-conception,

individuality, group identification, what I may hope for, what I

have done, etc. So “personal identity,” insofar as it’s important

to people, tends to bring to mind these issues, and not simply

one-to-one relationships or transitivity. Of course, it is related

to strict identity; I tend to think of myself as one and as self-

identical. And notions of identicalness are inherent in the idea

of personal identity: we want to punish only the very person who

committed a crime, for example. But across time, because some

Literally Like/4

parts of a person change while others remain the same, personal

identity becomes indeterminate. So it’s not unfair to say of

someone who has undergone a complete memory wipe both “she’s not

the same person I married,” and “that’s the same person I met ten

years ago,” because each claim references different identity

conditions. This is going to be the case with any reducible

entity. The antique watch is the same watch my grandfather gave

to me; I’ve had and cherished it for years. But the authentic

antique dealer holds that it is not the same because I replaced

five parts. We are both right: we are just looking at different

elements and to different purposes in applying “same.”

Ascriptions of sameness of persons are even more context-

dependent because persons are subject to so many forms of

interest.

In analyzing sameness of persons, or “personal identity,” it’s

crucial that our end-result tracks at least most of our practical

interests in asking the question; otherwise, we’ll have found

continuity conditions for something other than personal identity.

In arguing this, I’ll agree with Schechtman’s claim that

statements like “she’s become a different person” (Schechtman,

Literally Like/5

2007). are not merely metaphorical, and I’ll agree with David

Shoemaker that our concerns are inherently important to our moral

and metaphysical conceptions of identity (Shoemaker, 2007).

The concern and context sensitivity here does not imply that

“person” simply collects a disparate set of concepts, as, say,

“run” in “run in a stocking,” and “I built a rabbit run.” Rather,

persons are such complex entities that, when we talk about “same

person,” we might be adverting to one or another set of

constituent elements as necessary for sameness depending on

context. Memories, all of the body except the cerebellum, the

cerebellum, the ability to interact, personality, etc. – there

are scenarios that allow for continuity while removing any of

these parts, and contexts that will rule against continuity if

some of these parts are removed. If I slowly replace all my parts

with prostheses, I still exist as legally responsible, even if I

cease to be a human animal. If I lose all higher brain function,

I might exist for purpose of ownership of goods (my assets will

be spent caring for my body, presumably), but not as a person

that can be legally punished for prior wrongdoing. Someone might

still visit my body in the hospital and say, “that’s him,”

Literally Like/6

whereas another person might not visit, saying “he is gone.”

They’re both right, given certain purposes. The one who says

“that’s him” may want some bodily entity to take my place in what

Schechtman (2010) calls “person space.” The one who says “he is

gone” could hold that an inert body is simply not a person. A

disagreement between these two people is likely to be “empty,” in

Parfit’s sense, in that they can agree on all the underlying

facts but disagree on the application of a term. But it can be

full in that one can describe to the other why they are using the

term they’re using, and how that usage might reflect on matters

of concern. The fact that there is so much disagreement in these

cases shows that we haven’t settled on a simple, single criterion

for whether a person continues in all cases. This is because a

vast number of types of parts make up a person, and different

sets of parts answer to different needs and concerns. As David

Shoemaker (2011, pg 317) rightly notes, “the practical concerns

motivating investigation into personal identity turn out to be

not univocal, as is typically thought, such that each of the

different practical concerns may actually be related to personal

identity in very different ways.” But they are also related to

Literally Like/7

personal identity in a similar way, in that in most cases the

identity question is settled by looking at some set of person-

parts that are relevant to the context of the question.

1. Types of identity

Most strictly, identity must be transitive and one-to-one. But

it’s not clear that any material object ever has this kind of

identity across time. Watches, boats and nations, to take popular

examples, change their underlying parts while still, on some

accounts, maintaining identity with former forms, in spite of not

being identical. Even inert lumps of platinum undergo change over

time. There’s no reason to assume that something as complex as

personal identity could accord with the strictest identity

conditions.

Thus, David Lewis, in his “Methuselah” case, concludes that

“personal identity may be a matter of degree because personhood

is a matter of degree, even though identity is not” (Lewis,

p.32). He notes that someone at time Tn can fail to be the same

person as some prior, organically continuous, person at Tn-x,

Literally Like/8

where X is 137 years, and the organism has undergone physical and

mental changes at the same rate as a normal human, so that at Tn

it will have almost no memories, mental content, or physical

elements in common with Tn-x. Along the way, personal identity

becomes partially undone, and thus Lewis claims that it is “a

matter of degrees.”

Without waiting 137 years, we find a similar discontinuity in

people who have lost the vast majority of their memories and

character traits. David Shoemaker distinguishes between a

“characterization” sense of identity, which is essentially the

psychological traits and “character” of a person, and a

“reidentification” sense, which he thinks of as the more

“metaphysical” sense, and one that will accord with strict,

transitive, one-to-one identity relations (2007, pg. 335-337).

And these two senses can clearly come apart. Su Meck, at age 22,

had a traumatic brain injury that erased essentially all of her

episodic, semantic, and procedural memories, reducing her to the

functional equivalent of an infant (Meck and De Vise, 2014).

I woke up after the accident in the hospital not

knowing who or where I was. I couldn’t tie my own shoes.

Literally Like/9

I couldn’t read or write, add or subtract, tell time or

sit properly in a chair…[T]herapists taught me to walk,

to hold a fork and spoon and eventually how to ride a

bike. Others taught me letters and numbers. … I learned

that I had parents and a lot of brothers and sisters. I

learned that I had a husband named Jim and two babies,

Benjamin and Patrick, and I was reintroduced to them

nearly every day. (Meck, 2011)

Meck never regained memory of her former life. She asks, “Am I

supposed to be this other person who I was, or am I supposed to

be this new person” (Daily Mail, 2011)? Her question points to an

interesting contextual problem: she can ask about another person

whom she was. Which is to say, she both is and is not the same

person as the pre-accident Su Meck, depending on the context for

sameness. In David Shoemaker’s terms, she has lost the

characterization sense of Su Meck1, but retained a

reidentification sense; legally, for the purpose of ownership,

for example, she is the same person. Relationally, her parents

recognize her as their daughter: they advert to the animal

subset of person-parts, perhaps because they first encountered

Literally Like/10

her as an infant, an animal being with little relevant

psychological content. However, simply calling this sense

“reidentification” and taking it as unitary may be problematic:

her husband, for example, thinks of her as a new person, and

refuses to reidentify her with Su Meck1, because the identity he

is concerned about is personal identity, and that requires

adverting to her psychological elements. She is, in an

importantly literal sense, not the person he married, though she

is bodily continuous with that person.

The multiple answers to the question of whether Su Meck is the

same person can point to (at least) four ways in which personal

identity is measured:

psychologically

relationally

physically

legally.

Relationally, her parents continued to think of her as their

(much changed) daughter. But her husband described her as “a

different person,” and she called the prior Su Meck “[an]other

person.” Legally, she remained owner of all her property, but,

Literally Like/11

presumably, would not be liable for criminal punishment for acts

committed prior to her accident. Physically, she had basic

continuity, but psychologically, she had none. Her husband said,

“It was Su 2.0. She had rebooted…it was literally like she had died.

Her personality was gone [emphasis added]” (De Vise, 2013)”

This is what Lewis called “personal identity to reduced

degrees,” (1976, pg. 32) and is similar to what Schectman

discusses in “Personhood and the Practical:” “Mother in the late

stages of dementia may no longer be the feisty, independent, and

quick-witted woman I remember, but she is still ‘Mother, the

woman who sacrificed so much to raise me’…These losses do not…

simply erase our complex histories with others or remove us from

the web of relationships that makes up a human life [emphasis

added]” (2010, pg. 276-277). So, there are types of continuity

(physical, relational, psychological, legal), subtypes (e.g.

legal ownership, criminal responsibility) and degrees within

types, creating contexts in which we are, and are not, the same

person as we once were.

2. Limits on singular criteria of identity

Literally Like/12

The psychological and physical criteria for personal identity

each answer well to some cases, and not others. This is because

sometimes we are asking about mere physical continuity, sometimes

about continuity of personality, sometimes about who is

responsible, etc.

a. Psychological versions of continuity of identity

For the psychological continuity theorist, such as Locke (ch.

XXVII, 1689), Nagel (1979), Sydney Shoemaker (1970) and Derek

Parfit, sameness of persons is determined by sameness of mental

content. Responding to Locke, Thomas Reid (1785, in Perry, 1975)

objected that this would lead someone to both be and not be the

same person as some past self as memories disintegrated over

time. David Lewis rightly accepts this in his “matter of

degrees.” Parfit says, “If we accept a Reductionist View, we

shall believe that the identity of a thing may be, in a quite

unpuzzling way, indeterminate” (1984, pg. 213; see also pgs. 240-

241, 264-265, and 352). If some subset of the parts to which a

Literally Like/13

thing is reduced are changed, it is at some point unclear if it

is the same thing.

If we look closely at these parts, it could be that for some

given purpose, the object has sameness of identity at a change of

10 parts, but not for other purposes, as in the case of the

sentimental watch owner and the antique watch dealer.

Similarly, for persons, a radical change in personality may be

enough for someone to say, “that’s not the man I married,” or for

Su Meck to describe some prior iteration of her human organism as

“another person,” or her husband to say she was now “Su Meck 2.0”

and that it was “literally like she had died,” because her

“personality was gone.” Lacking any psychological continuity, she

would have to count as a different person under this criterion.

But Jim Meck continued to be married to her, and she was cared

for and treated as a (radically injured) Su Meck. If we simply

accept the psychological theory, there’s no way to establish that

someone like Su Meck or Schechtman’s dementia patient is in any

way the same person. While in some sense, the patient is not the

same person, the daughter is still visiting her mother, who still

owns property, is covered by an insurance policy that names her,

Literally Like/14

etc. For that to make sense, we need different criteria for

continuity.

b. Physical versions of personal identity

i. Thought experiments: guilt, brain transplants, objects of

affection

Both Judith Jarvis Thomson (2008) and Eric Olson (1997a,

1997b) hold that if the brain, or at least the parts of the brain

containing our personal psychology, were transplanted to another

body, we would not go with them. “If your cerebrum were moved to

another head, the one who ended up with that organ would believe

that she was you. But according to the Biological View she would

be wrong about this” (Olson 1997b, pg. 108). The person would

remain with the de-brained body, assuming it stayed alive, either

by leaving enough of the brain to cover basic biological

functions, or by putting a new brain in its place. But this seems

to fail to capture essential senses of “person.” If I don’t go

with my brain, then is guilt obviated by brain transplant? Laws

explicitly apply to persons. The forensic and legal sense of

Literally Like/15

“person” is at the heart of an important, quite literal, use of

the term with strong connections to its original sense. Olson

agrees that the brain will continue to carry the guilt, but

believes that in the brain transplant the body is where the

person is. That the guilt goes with the brain, he says, is “a

very important truth… to anyone but a metaphysician it is more

important than the truth about who is numerically identical with

whom” (1997a, ch. 3, sec. vii). Olson holds that it is only a

“practical sense” of “person” that tracks the person with the

brain, but that this cannot track personal identity. But we need

to identify the guilty the party. If personal identity can’t track

this, then this model of personal identity misses an important

sense of the term. If our use of “person” goes so far from not

only the common use, but such an important use, then we have to

ask if we have captured the term at all. Either, (as David

Shoemaker suggests in his discussions of animalism) identity is

not what we advert to when we apply “person,” or, more likely,

that we have picked out the wrong carrier, the physical body, for

the purposes of identity in this case.

Literally Like/16

There are cases, though, where the bodily criterion is apt. A

doctor tells us Moe’s brain has been destroyed, but we may visit

his body, kept alive in the hospital. We might say “that’s Moe,”

like Schechtman’s daughter of a dementia patient who points to

her mother’s brain-dead body and says, “[that’s] mother, the

woman who sacrificed so much to raise me” (Schechtman, 2012, pg

276). If Moe’s body died we would say Moe was dead. But if we

learned that Moe’s brain (or cerebellum) lived on, transplanted

or kept alive and functioning and able to communicate, we would

say, “we were wrong; Moe is not dead.” And we would mean that

quite literally. I suppose in a world of brain transplants we

might need to work out some customs about how to speak about

these things, but I doubt we would call the body “Moe” and say

Moe was dead while Moe’s brain, and its new carrier, were there

beside us. Further, while we might need to work out the law on

this, it seems unlikely that brainless-Moe-body would be punished

for Moe’s crimes or that brain-Moe would now be free from

prosecution. In a case where a prince’s brain (“Brainy”) is

transplanted into a cobbler’s body, Olson says, “I am willing to

concede that Brainy is not responsible for Cobbler’s past

Literally Like/17

actions.” But if we concede that, then we should concede that, at

least for legal purposes, where “person” has a clear and

established use, the body is not the person, and for purposes of

reidentification of the legal person we have to track the holder

of psychological content, and must do so on some well-grounded

basis.

ii. The motivations for physicalism/animalism

Animalist/physicalist views preserve some important senses of

personal identity, including continuity with fetuses and severely

brain-damaged persons. This is not just a result of these

positions, but the motivation for them. Olson is clear on this:

“the only sound solution to the fetus problem is to give up

traditional thinking about personal identity and accept the

Biological View” (1997b, pg.109-110). If our concerns in asking

about sameness of persons are not so much preserving identity

with fetuses, but capturing, as David Shoemaker notes,

“significant prudential and ethical practices and concerns,”

(2007, pg. 317), we might be inclined to emphasize other senses

of “person.”

Literally Like/18

Even if we just want to maintain identity with all bodily

phases of persons, the physicalist/animalist accounts face many

of the same problems as psychological accounts, and call for just

as many ad hoc elements. If part of the motivation for the

animalist account was that it avoided the “A survives as B and C”

problem of psychological fission, simply splitting a human down

the line of symmetry and providing artificial organs as needed

would leave us with two animals. Olson claims that an animal

survives as long as “circulation, respiration, metabolism, and

the like continue to function, or as long as those activities

have not irreversibly come to a halt, or as long as one's

capacity to direct and regulate those functions is not destroyed”

(1997a, ch.4, sec. v). In the case of Tom’s head kept alive by

artificial means, he says there is no “living organism,” because

“Without artificial help, the head-complement could not behave

like a living animal even for a moment” (1997; ch.6, section

iii). But at another point, he allows some artificial means:

“With the help of a feeding tube inserted into its stomach,

[someone with no higher brain function] can survive in this state

almost indefinitely…If you wanted to bury or cremate the animal,

Literally Like/19

you would have to kill it” (1997a, ch. 1 sec i). There needs to

be a good, non-arbitrary reason why a feeding tube in the body of

an animal that is incapable of movement is not “artificial help,”

but a respirator is. And such a reason needs to carefully

distinguish those very-much brain-alive people who need

respirators, heart machines, etc., to maintain their existence.

If Shawna’s brain stem is damaged such that she can no longer

regulate basic bodily functions, but her cerebellum is still

functioning, and we use a machine to replace the damaged brain

stem, keeping her body alive and communicating by direct brain-

to-brain interface (Rao, 2014), it would be odd to think that she

is dead, or surrenders personal identity, merely because

artificial means are used. We could perhaps accept that Shawna is

not, in such a case, essentially an animal. Olson holds that

there are cases where the animal persists but the forensic person

does not (1997a, ch. 3 sec vii). So he should allow that the

forensic (and perhaps relational, prudentially self-concerned,

etc.) person can persist though the animal does not. But we still

have to establish identity conditions for this person: he says it

is “for ethicists to tell us…who can be treated as whom. These

Literally Like/20

are not metaphysical questions because being the same person…is not a

metaphysical relation” (1997a, ch.3 sec vii). But it cannot be a

merely ethical question: we need to be aware of the underlying

facts, and these do require a metaphysical (in the broad sense)

analysis to prevent them from being arbitrary. Reductionism

provides the underlying metaphysics to guide the question, and

our concerns guide us in picking out which elements are relevant

for personal identity. For the fetus question, this might be the

set of elements that constitute the animal; for the criminal

question, this will involve psychological elements. But we must

be sure that the person we punish is identical, in the relevant

sense, to the person who committed the crime.

iii. Guilt and Responsibility

If we slowly replace all of our non-brain parts with machine

parts, and our psychology continues in the normal sense, an

animal ceases but a person continues. We could do this with a

piecemeal series of organ transplants or machine implants. If a

failing brain could be supplemented by mechanical parts that

would slowly take on its functions over several years, and this

Literally Like/21

is becoming increasingly likely (Guggenmosa et al, 2013), we

could gradually cease to be animals. Again, this would not

release us from criminal liability, or destroy our legal

personhood. And if an account of “person” fails to correspond

with legal language that names persons as responsible for crimes,

then we miss an important sense of “person.” Olson notes that “a

single human being such as you or I might be one particular

person at one time… and another particular person later on,”

because “being the same person…does not necessarily coincide with

strict identity” (1997a,ch.3 sect. vii). But again, we need more

than legal fiat to make one person the same as some prior person:

this must rest upon good grounds, and the reductionist offers

some means of finding these grounds in looking for the relevant set

of persisting underlying constituents for the purpose of legal

identity (which may split into responsibility identity and

financial identity, etc.), such that the person punished is, in

the right way, identical to the person who committed a crime, and

not simply some other person who resembles the perpetrator in a

way that may be relevant for other purposes. Olson notes that

“This task is comparable to that of finding a reason for holding

Literally Like/22

Brainy [the being created when Prince’s brain is transplanted

into a new body] morally responsible for Prince's [i.e. the pre-

transplant Prince] actions that is not also a reason for holding

Smith's duplicate morally responsible for Smith's actions”

(1997a, ch. 3, sec. vi). But we can only find this reason by

looking at the underlying facts about what elements of Prince

survive, and what elements of Smith are not in his duplicate, and

asking if these are the elements of the person that are necessary

for identifying this being with the perpetrator. It may well be that

the final analysis holds Smith’s duplicate responsible for

Smith’s crime, or that it does not, but this must rest upon a

well-grounded analysis of what counts as being legally identical

to the criminal.

3. Practical Concern and the Meaning of “Person”

As Olson notes, “Being the same person is a moral or practical

relation, and there is no reason to expect it to have the same

formal features as identity strictly so called” (1997a, ch. 3

sec. vii). But being the same animal is also a moral or practical

Literally Like/23

relation; Olson, holds that a fertilized egg becomes a separate

animal when it sheds its placental cells, and that it ceases to

be when it can no longer naturally support respiration and

metabolism. This solves the fetus problem. But we might, for

practical purposes, hold that the animal begins when it can

naturally support respiration and metabolism on its own, since

that is more in keeping with Olson’s end point: the animal’s

ability to independently support respiration and metabolism. This

would be more consistent, but Olson requires the asymmetry to

answer both the fetus and the brain-dead problems. We should

admit that there’s no purely natural cut-off point in either

direction, and some degree of arbitrary decision-making is

involved, generally motivated by our purpose in asking the

question of sameness of animal.

Bracketing the practical concerns with the fetus problem that

motivate the animalist accounts, Schechtman writes “According to

the animalist, the metaphysical fact of identity is completely

independent of our practical concerns” (2010, p.277). David

Shoemaker notes that the animalist can respond by “showing how a

lack of fit with our practical concerns is not a plausibility

Literally Like/24

condition for theories of personal identity” (2011, pg 2). If

this account is right (Schechtman rejects it and Shoemaker thinks

the response is only partially successful), on some version of

these accounts, Su Meck is mistaken, or is speaking “loosely,” in

not identifying with her prior self, and her husband is similarly

loose or mistaken in thinking of her as Su Meck 2.0. That is, the

person Su Meck has not ceased to be, there’s merely a “practical

sense” in which Su Meck is not the same person. What needs both

analysis and the respect of the philosopher of personal identity,

in all its senses, is that Su Meck and her husband’s

understanding that she is not the same person gets at something

deeply important about sameness of persons. This sense of

sameness is grounded in the relevant constituent elements of the

person upon which it supervenes, and this grounding relation is,

in the broad sense, metaphysical, in that it calls for continuity

of elements across time. The person herself may not be an

“entity” in a metaphysical sense (though such senses are

notoriously hard to pin down) but the relation between the person

and the underlying elements is certainly open to the

metaphysician’s analysis, if reductionism can be seen in the

Literally Like/25

broad sense as a metaphysical analysis, and if we understand that

the various elements required for different senses of person do

have important persistence conditions. In looking at the belief

of Su Meck and her husband (and 80% of respondents in Shaun

Nichols survey (2010, pg. 35)) that she is not the person that

existed prior to the brain damage case, we needn’t think of

persons as substances to understand that they supervene upon sets

of facts, and that some continuity of some subset of the things

that a person is (in this case, memories, personality, beliefs,

etc.) are jointly necessary for certain senses of sameness of

person, while others, for this same sense of ‘same person’ (here,

bodily continuity) are not sufficient (and, given some

technological advancements, not necessary) for sameness. Further,

this sense involves not only a standard intuition about sameness

of person, but what it is that made “person” such a valuable term

in the first place (I elaborate on this in section 4 below), that

is, that it related to prudential concerns about how we re-

identify people of importance to us. In a deep sense, the person

who lived as Su Meck up to the point of her accident has ceased

to be because the constituent parts of that Su Meck were

Literally Like/26

destroyed, even while some constituent parts of the animal were

preserved. We might even note that while she and her husband saw

her as a different person, her parents still thought of her as

their daughter, but they started with an animal Su Meck, an

infant with little mental content, and their concerns might be

more directed towards the animal, whereas Su’s husband was

concerned that the person he married, a particular character with

whom he shared values and memories, had vanished in the accident.

Similarly, Nichols (2010) claimed to have found “conflicting

intuitions” about personal identity in a survey of non-

philosophers. If asked, “can I persist if my memories are gone,”

80% of said no. If asked if they would feel pain after having

their memories wiped, 75% said yes. But the complex reductionist

account eliminates the “conflict” in these intuitions: it is just

that different subsets of the elements of the person are relevant

in each case. The first case presumably tracks people’s concerns

with their ability to be the same person in terms of enacting a

particular role. The second, with the merely physical capacity to

feel pain.

Literally Like/27

A full reduction of the person must take account of what

counts as identity or sameness of person in different instances,

accounting for the set of elements that constitute persons and

for the way in which persons fit into our conventions,

phenomenologies, and concerns. We have relatively little

philosophical discussion of problems with what happens to

identity when a corporation splits. But what’s being asked in a

personal fission case isn’t “who carries on the corporate debt,”

but whom do I love? Who wronged me? To whom do I owe gratitude?

And these concerns motivate much greater philosophical interest.

When philosophers demand a unified response with strict numerical

identity, we face riddles. But as David Shoemaker notes, too many

of the accounts “presupposed a univocal understanding of the

personal identity relation” (2007, pg. 330). In proposing that we

replace personal identity with ownership, he says “talk of

identity doesn’t help and may actually hurt (by distracting our

attention away from the actual conditions of ownership).

Identity is the reddest of herrings” (2011, pg. 33). But even the

ownership question requires that we identify and re-identify the

owner, and that owner is generally a person, and must have

Literally Like/28

identity conditions, even if they are different in some cases

from the identity conditions for some individual animal or

psychological being. So we must also be concerned about an overly

simple, univocal understanding of “same person.”

As Schechtman notes, one response to this is to claim that one

use of the term is literal, and the other metaphorical, or “just

a way of speaking.” But this misses that the word “person” was

developed to describe just the sort of situations in which we

need to re-identify people for particular purposes.

4. Literal and metaphorical

Schechtman, in discussing cases of extreme character change,

(Parfit’s young Russian socialist who becomes a nobleman, and her

own ‘party girl’ who becomes a ‘responsible matron’) says there

is an “assumption that the only sense in which characters like

the young Russian and the party girl do survive [gross character

change]…is genuine survival, and the sense in which they fail to

survive…is only metaphorical. But there is no strong basis for

this assumption” (2007, pg 241).

Literally Like/29

Could we claim that everyone who uses “person” as Su Meck does,

claiming that the prior Su Meck has ceased to be, is being non-

literal? If the word “person” had simply meant “human animal” at

one time, and then was extended to its philosophical sense,

perhaps we could make this claim. It still would be a matter of

debate if the word was now metaphorical. Rivers, as Donald

Davidson (1978, pg. 37) notes, have mouths, even if that was once

a metaphor.

But the word “person” did not originally mean “human being.” It

developed from a theatrical term, referring to the masks that

actors wore (Latin “persona”), and meant something like “role” or

“character.” It acquired its more modern sense during the debates

about the personhood of the Trinity. So in fact, it began with

what David Shoemaker calls the “character” sense of the term, and

was specifically applied to an entity (the deity) that could

exist either with or without a human body. Applying it simply to

human organisms is an extension of that initial sense. Still, it

would not be fair to say that it is not literal to speak of a

human organism as a person, because that is one of its acquired

common uses. But the philosophical and legal senses are clearly

Literally Like/30

drawn from the original sense, as evidenced by all the early

explorations of “person,” and Locke’s claim that it is a forensic

term. A theory of personal identity that cannot track these

traditional senses loses plausibility, as David Shoemaker notes,

in that it does not answer to the meaning of “person.”

The use of “person” to denote “in one’s own character, form or

voice” or “in one’s proper role or capacity,” that is, a

character sense, is attested as early as 1402 in English, at the

roughly the same time as the “bodily” sense (OED, “person”,

retrieved 11/18 2014). The legal use of “person,” as a being

that carries responsibility for an action and is the owner of

property, is among the earliest uses, attested in 1390 (Ibid),

including appearances in the 1444 Rolls of Parliament, and

continuing, to this day, in law, where, for example, criminal

statutes are phrased, “A person is guilty of [X] if [Y]…1” If Su

Meck is not the legal person she once was for criminal liability,

or if it is not the case that one can escape guilt by having

1 This is how all the criminal laws are phrased in, for example, the NY Statepenal code http://ypdcrime.com/penal.law/article120.htm?zoom_highlight=assault#p120.00

Literally Like/31

one’s brain or cerebellum transplanted to a new body, then the

she is, in a strictly literal sense, not the same person.

Further, the sense in which we say, “You’re not the person I

once knew,” doesn’t function like a metaphor: (1) we do not need

to decode it in order to debate it, as we would with, say, “man

is wolf.” ” (2) When we say "she's a different person,” there’s

no need to consult a metaphoric “secondary subject.” Juliet is

not literally the sun, but if a brain injury causes her to become

an emotionless killer, she is literally no longer the Juliet we

once knew. (3) In context, saying, “you’re not the person I knew”

can start with clear parameters for disagreement, which is not

the case in asking if Whitman is right that “your very flesh

shall be a great poem.” In asking if Su Meck is the same person,

we ask about what has changed, and then ask if our application of

the term “same person” is apt for the purpose at hand. In this

case, people may agree on her being or not being the same person,

or disagree about which elements are relevant. This would seem

like a Parfit-style “empty question,” in that they agree on all

the underlying facts, but what the phrase “empty question” misses

is that much hangs upon the disagreement about which subset of

Literally Like/32

the elements of the person are necessary for sameness in this

case.

So, in the event of brain wipe, we can say I don’t survive,

that I do survive, or that I "sort of" survive and "sort of"

don't, because a body persists but a mind does not. And if the

loss of this mind counts as non-survival, then surely something

(in the broadest sense) failed to survive. We can maintain that

"person" tracks bodies, or that it tracks characters, as David

Shoemaker notes, “by stipulating that connection as a condition on

eligible theories of identity in the first place,” (2007, pg.

334) but neither of these are fair to ordinary language, which

allows “person” to track either. So, it’s "literally like"

there’s a new person, because on the one hand it is literally

true, but on the other, there remains a sense of person in which

this is not a new person, but the same person. That is why it is

both literally and like there’s a new person: the person we knew

is literally gone, but with a bodily presence making it seem like

she’s still there. Or the legal-ownership and physical person is

literally still there, but it’s like Su herself is gone. These

two readings simply emphasize different sets of person elements

Literally Like/33

as necessary for continuity. If we accept that the complex

concept “person” is such that, due to being composed of parts,

some of which persist and some of which do not, for some concerns

we have a literally different person, while at the same time, for

other purposes, having literally the same person, the

philosophical exchange on this topic becomes clearer. We can then

focus on identity conditions for, say, the criminal person, or

the animal person, or whatever is relevant. This both tracks how

“person” is actually used, and what concerns we have when we

speak about persons in differing contexts.

Perhaps Olson is correct in saying “the only sound solution to

the fetus problem is to give up traditional thinking about

personal identity and accept the Biological View” (1997b pg. 99),

(though I think it’s equally reasonable to solve the fetus

problem by admitting that, in an important sense, I was never a

fetus.) But there are plenty of other problems that are not

solved by that move, and many of them, like the legal

responsibility problem, are as or more important than the “fetus

problem,” and just as subject to strict analysis by focusing on

relevant parts and their continuity conditions.

Literally Like/34

5. Conclusion

As Parfit says, “We might say, of someone, `After his accident,

he is no longer the same person'. This is a claim about both

kinds of identity” (1984, pg. 201). If we accept a reductionist

view of the person, we can accept that a complete loss of a

personality, as in Su Meck’s case, is a change of person. And the

reductionist view accords with Lewis’s view that personal

identity comes in degrees, so it’s not wrong to think of someone

being a somewhat new person, or to simply say, “he’s not the

person he once was,” and to mean it literally, and understand it

to track a very important sense of “person,” even if we also

understand that it doesn’t track all senses.

Klein and Nichols hold that these cases of indeterminate

survival and non-survival come from a conflation of two sorts of

personal identity (Klein and Nichols, 2012), one that contains

traits and another that is “traitless.” Parfit accounts for

identity with the “overlapping chain of psychological content”

Literally Like/35

model; in response to people with multiple-personality Mark Brown

offers the “failure to integrate alternative autobiographical

memory schemata” (2001, p442 et passim); Schechtman relies on a

relational account and reference to an entity’s place in “person

space”(2010, pg 279); Olsen adverts to the biological; Williams

famously used a thought experiment about our reluctance to be

tortured even if we first had our memory wiped (1973, pg. 52) to

show that we persist even if we lose all psychological content.

Each account describes sameness in some context or for some

purpose. Contextualist reductionism can clarify this by noting in

what way we survive, and what we don’t, and what the relevant

criteria are for each type of survival.

David Shoemaker’s pluralism about concerns (2007) can be

profitably extended to a restricted pluralism of senses of

“person,” grounded by reduction to parts, and individuated, in

part, by practices that track important and grounded senses of

“same person.” Instead of a single criterion for personal

identity, or using only both the physical and the psychological

criteria, we benefit from seeing that context may call for

Literally Like/36

further discrimination. We could begin by dividing the contexts

into legal, relational, physical, and psychological senses of

“same person.” A more fine-grained analysis then might split

legal continuity, for example, into continuity of the criminal

actor and continuity of the physical owner of property.

This plurality of questions, criteria, and standards for

continuity of identity create a high degree of indeterminacy in

at least some cases. A reductionist account does the best job of

taking account of these indeterminacies by looking at the

underlying, agreed upon facts, and allowing that some forms of

survival call for one set of elements, and others call for

others. This analysis also prevents the question from descending

into purely subjective indeterminacy: there is a strong

acceptance of the existence of underlying facts, and the

particular context-dependent use of “same” applies only when

certain sets of facts persist. Further, this does not demand that

all loose and metaphoric sense of “not the same” be accepted;

there are still a large set of literal senses of “same person,”

with reasonably clear criteria for persistence, which can be

profitably analyzed. If there were no change in the person, the

Literally Like/37

answer to these questions would be obvious. But given that there

is change, we must ask if this change is relevant to this question.

The major existing accounts each answer to some of our concerns

and solve some problems. But solving this or that dilemma while

leaving us with a version of personhood that demands that we

accept that we do not “survive” brain transplant, or that the

comatose body in the bed is not, in any relevant sense, my

father, fails to account for how “person” works. Any choice of an

account that produces these results is arbitrary and excludes

important sense of sameness of person. But we can sum these under

a large reductionist account of persons, such that persons are

composed of bodies, psychological content, agency, social

positions, relations, etc. It is nonetheless not the case that

any one of these will be absolutely necessary for continuity in

all cases; they’re all just normal constituents of it.

While this analysis can provide promising results in puzzle

cases, it is drawn from real-world cases, and tracks most closely

with how we use “same person,” and its synonyms and implications.

It has the further benefit of settling the “conflicting

intuitions” in surveys on identity, and bridging at least some of

Literally Like/38

the disagreements between the physical and psychological

accounts. This leaves open a project of analyzing personal

identity in different cases and of different sorts. For the

identity of a criminal, for example, it’s not clear that bodily

continuity will matter if, at some point, we can slowly replace

all our parts with prostheses. The relevant subset of elements

involves some set of the psychological constituents of the

criminal. For identity with regard to who is the owner of some

goods, a brain-dead body may be the sufficient condition. But

each case already contains criteria for identity, and looking to

these can help us explicate the nature of persons and personal

identity in a way that respects the complexity of the real use of

these concepts.

The author would like to thank Jeannie Im, J. Adeshei Carter, Matias Bulnes-Beniscelli,Alexa Capoleto, Danielle Magaldi-Dopman, members of the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publication Program, and especially the anonymous reviewer at Southern Journal for invaluable assistance with this paper.

References:

Literally Like/39

Brown, Mark T. "Multiple personality and personal identity." Philosophical Psychology 14.4 (2001): 435-447.

Daily Mail, “Mother Has Second Childhood After Her Brain Erased at 22” Daily Mail online, May 26, 2011, retrieved August 5, 2013, from http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1390674/Mother-Hollywood-amnesia-second-childhood-brain-ERASED-age-22.html#ixzz2b754HAIc

Davidson, Donald, “What Metaphors Mean,” Critical Inquiry, vol 5 no 1,autumn 1978,

De Vise, Daniel, , “Gaithersburg woman earns college degree two decades after complete memory loss,” Washinton Post, May 21 1011 by. Accessed April 1 2013 at http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2011-05-21/local/35265255_1_amnesia-memory-husband

Guggenmosa, David J., et al, “Restoration of function after braindamage using a neural prosthesis”, Proceedings of the National Academy ofSciences, vol 110, no. 52, December 24, 2013.

Klein, SB, and Nichols, S, “Memory and the Sense of Personal Identity,” Mind, Vol. 121, No. 483 (July 2012) , pp. 677-702

Lewis, David “Survival and Identity,” in The Identities of Persons, ed.Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, University of California Press, Berkeley,1976

Locke, John, Chapter XXVII, “Identity and Diversity” in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 1689

Meck, Su, “The Re-Education of an Amnesiac,” New York Times Magazine, published Sept. 16, 2011, retrieved August 5, 2013, from http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/18/magazine/lives-restarting-from-scratch.html?_r=0

Meck, Su, and David de Vise, I Forgot to Remember: A Memoir of Amnesia, Simon and Schuster, New York, 2014.

Literally Like/40

Nagel, Thomas, ‘Brain Bisection and the Unity of Consciousness’, in Nagel, Mortal Questions, Cambridge University Press 1979

Nichols, Shaun, “Intuitions about Personal Identity: An empiricalstudy,” Philosophical Psychology, Vol. 23, no. 3, June 2010Olson, Eric, “Was I Ever A Fetus” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 57(1), 95-110, March 1997b

Olson, Eric, The Human Animal Personal Identity without Psychology, ch 3.1, Oxford University Press, New York, 1997a

Oxford English Dictionary, “Person,” retrieved 11/8/2014 from www.oed.com

Parfit, Derek. Reasons and persons. Oxford University Press, 1984.

Rao, Rajesh PN, et al. "A direct brain-to-brain interface in humans." PloS one 9.11 (2014): e111332.

Reid, Thomas, 1785, “Of Memory,” in Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, reprinted in Perry, ed, Personal Identity, 1975 as “Of Identity”(pp. 107–112)

Schechtman, Marya, “Empathic Access: The Missing Ingredient in Personal Identity” In Personal Identity, ed. Martin and Barresi, Blackwell, 2007

Schechtman, Marya. "Personhood and the practical." Theoretical medicine and bioethics 31.4 (2010): 271-283.

Shoemaker, David “The Stony Metaphysical Heart of Animalism,” (unpublished, available at author’s Academia.edu website) 2011

Shoemaker, David W. "Personal identity and practical concerns." Mind 116.462 (2007): 317-357.

Shoemaker, Sydney. "Persons and their pasts." American Philosophical Quarterly (1970): 269-285.

Thompson, Judith Jarvis, “People and their Bodies,” pg158-160, inContemporary Debates in Metaphysics, ed. Sider, Hawthorne, Zimmerman, Blackwell, Malden, Massachussets, 2008.

Literally Like/41

Williams, Bernard, “The Self and the Future,” in Problems of the Self,p52, Cambridge University Press, 1973