Is There a Circularity Involved in Parfit's Reductionist View of Personal Identity? - Goodenough

8/2/2019 Is There a Circularity Involved in Parfit's Reductionist View of Personal Identity? - Goodenough

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IS THERE A CIRCULARITY INVOLVED IN PARFIT'SREDUCTIONIST VIEW OF PERSONAL IDENTITY?

Jerry Goodenough

With his reductionist view of personal identity,Parfit hopes to show that persons arefundamentally sets of psychological states/events,that such sets are diachronically related in certainways and that therefore the identity conditions of persons can be reduced to or replaced by survivalconditions analysable in terms of the persistence of these sets of psychological states/events.Consequently, it would be illegitimately circular to

include this definition of persons among thepremises of those arguments which are used tosupport it. But precisely this charge has been laidagainst psychological reductionism, that itsmethodology involves an inherent and cripplingcircularity.

I

Charges of circularity have been made againstreductionist accounts of personal identity eversince Locke wrote:

For since consciousness always accompaniesthinking, and it is that that makes everyone to bewhat he calls self , and thereby distinguisheshimself from all other thinking things: in this aloneconsists personal identity i.e. the sameness of arational being. And as far as this consciousness can

be extended backwards to any past action orthought, so far reaches the identity of that person;[1]

where consciousness was to be cashed out in termsof memory, and Bishop Butler responded that:

one should really think it self-evident, thatconsciousness of personal identity presupposes,and therefore cannot constitute, personal identity,

any more than knowledge, in any other case, canconstitute truth, which it presupposes.[2]

http://www.uea.ac.uk/phi/research/UEA4PAP2.html#1%231






Here the accusation against Locke was couched interms of the illegitimacy of the relationshipproposed as the sole constituent of personalidentity and much subsequent debate has centred

around the possibilities of defending the memorytheory of personal identity against updated formsof the circularity criticism.[3] In more recent times,the reductionist stratagem has been to preservethe definition of personal identity by using a re-defined concept of memory, quasi-memory, whoseredefinition is supposed to exclude the possibilityof circularity by eliminating the apparent necessityof diachronic personal identity from the mnemonic

relationship: if I must remember only my ownmemories, perhaps I can quasi-remember memoriesthat are not necessarily mine.[4]

However, the kind of circularity I have in mind hereis of a more serious nature and one not amenableto exclusion by a simple process of redefinition. Forthe claim is that the very nature of themethodology of hypothetical cases is such as toimport, more or less surreptitiously, the definition

of persons which the methodology is supposed toestablish. By agreeing to engage in the thoughtexperiment method, by agreeing to accept assignificant all or any of the 'strong beliefs' whichParfit and other reductionists see as beinggenerated by this method, non-reductionists are infact surrendering their case at the start becausethe thought experiment method when applied topersonal identity will naturally tend to import

covert reductionist assumptions from the outset.

II

We might start an examination of possiblecircularity here by considering an argument whichMark Johnston brings against the method of hypothetical cases when applied to questions of personal identity. Johnston's argument rests upon aconsideration of Bernard Williams' 'mind-swap'

thought experiment. [5] Upon one presentation of
















this thought experiment we are supposed to decidethat physical continuity is not necessary forpersonal identity and upon the other presentationthat psychological continuity is not necessary for

personal identity. In the absence of any furtherevidence for continuity Johnston concludes that:

we get just the intuitive responses that seem toindicate that we are beings of the kind bare locusof mental life, where this characterisation is nowunderstood as including all that is necessary andsufficient for our persistence through time, so thatwe could undergo any sort of physical or mentalmetamorphosis.[6]

Next Johnston argues that if it were not for themethodology of cases we would be able to standback from the questions raised by reductionistsand, influenced perhaps by Strawson, ask ametaphysically more fundamental question:

What are the primary phenomena that aphilosophical theory of personal identity should aimto save?....There is the humble and ubiquitouspractice of re-identifying each other over time.Philosophical scepticism aside, this practice is areliable and mostly unproblematic source of knowledge about particular claims of personalidentity. So the primary question for a philosophicaltheory of personal identity is: What sort of thing issuch that things of that sort can be reliably andunproblematically re-identified over time in just theway in which we reliably and unproblematically

reidentify ourselves and each other over time?[7]

But the view that we are essentially mere barelocuses of mental life is conceptually far tooskeletal to enable such a process of reidentificationto proceed unproblematically, if at all. Thereforethe bare locus view of personal identity must beruled out. But if we accept the method of casesthen we cannot avoid accepting the bare locus

theory of personal identity. Therefore we mustreject the method of cases.







This bare summary of Johnston's argument doesscant justice to the subtlety of his presentation. Forinstance, Johnston makes it clear that it is not byaccident that the method of cases leads us to the

bare locus view but by an understandablepsychological effect perhaps similar to thenarrative influence of thought experiments I havediscussed elsewhere:

Our tendency to trace people in terms of psychological continuity in those puzzle cases inwhich such continuity comes apart from bodilycontinuity can be accounted for more satisfactorilyas an understandable overgeneralization from the

ordinary run of things...If such cases are describedsimply in terms of continuities we will be liable tobe misled by the normal psychological concomitantsof survival and so trace individuals in terms of psychological continuity....in accord with the widepsychological criterion [of Derek Parfit'sreductionism][8]

and the reason why we are liable to be misled here

is because

our intuitive reactions to the puzzle cases should beable to be taken as manifestations of our grasp of those necessary and sufficient conditions [for theapplication of the predicate 'is the same person'],and not as overgeneralizations from the everydayrun of cases or manifestations of a particularconception of people....But then it should beevident that this....requirement generates a

difficulty for the ideology behind the method of cases. Given the enormous variety of apparentlyconceptually coherent conceptions of people whichhave been entertained, we must assume that ourcommon concept of people, if there is such a thing,is quite unspecific;[9]

Johnston's argument is open to challenge at anumber of places. For instance, Snowdon argues

that:







there is a reason to think that the bare locus view isnot likely to be the view suggested by ourresponses to the envisaged example of Williams'[thought experiment]....although the bare locus

theory is consistent with the supposed intuitivereactions to the case, it provides no explanation atall for the different reactions to the different cases.[10]

Snowdon also queries whether the bare locus view,if anything coherent can be made out of it, isnecessarily incompatible with the more Strawsoniandemands for reidentification that Johnston's ownview of personal identity makes. Even if Johnston's

argument were granted in full, it is still arguablethat the reidentification procedure is only a rival tothe method of cases, leaving it open to personalidentity theorists to decide which approach theymight wish to follow. Snowdon is here perhapsover-dismissive of Johnston's arguments in viewboth of the many weaknesses inherent in themethodology of thought experiments and of theimportance of the reidentification constraint to our

general construction of the external world as awhole. For we must surely consider whether theconditions we adopt for re-identifying persons areat least consistent with those we use for the re-identification of other entities in the world.

III

Johnston's argument against the methodology of hypothetical cases does not involve a full-blown

accusation of circularity although it contains withinit the resources that would enable us to constructsuch a charge. For at the heart of Johnston's case isthe belief that in choosing to employ a methodologyof deriving apparent intuitions from hypotheticalcases we are already importing a view of the natureof persons at least covertly in the assumptionsupon which such a methodology relies. An explicitaccusation of inherent circularity in the

methodology of thought experiment is, however, to





be found in the work of Richard Wollheim.

Wollheim wishes to distinguish between twodifferent but often conflated questions. The first,'What is a person?', enquires after the identityconditions of an entity of some sort. The second,'What is a person's life?' is an enquiry about theidentity of a process. He believes that:

Many philosophers have been so preoccupied thatthey haven't always noticed whether they weretalking about a person and his identity or about aperson's life and its identity. They reveal this whenthey take what they have convinced themselves is a

perfectly satisfactory unity-relation for a person'slife and re-employ it, without adjustment, as thecriterion of identity for a person, and thus finish upwith a view of a person as a collection of eventsspread over time, which cannot be right.[11]

The philosophers that Wollheim has in mind hereare those of a strongly empiricist bent, andespecially those like Parfit who hoped thatpsychological states/events like memory could bemade criterial of personal identity. Wollheimcharacterises their approach thus:

Ultimately, of course, memory would be employedto answer questions of the form 'Are a and b thesame person?' But not initially. Initially memory isemployed to answer questions of the form 'Are x and y experiences of the same person?' And whatunderlies this strategy is the conviction that,

having asked enough questions of the second kind,we shall then be able, out of the answers we havegot to them, to answer questions of the first kind.[12]

That such a description is not a gross distortion of the position of such empiricists may be seen fromthe conclusions about personal identity that Parfithopes to draw:

There are two unities to be explained: the unity of consciousness at any time, and the unity of a whole







life. These two unities cannot be explained byclaiming that different experiences are had by thesame person. These unities must be explained bydescribing the relations between these many

experiences, and their relations to this person'sbrain. And we can refer to these experiences, and fully describe the relations between them, without claiming that these experiences are had by a person. (Emphasis added)[13]

Or, in other words, Parfit is claiming that we canconstruct a view of a person's life as a sequences of events related in some particular way, and that thisview is preferable to identity, for Parfit holds it as

fundamental that:

Personal identity is not what matters. Whatfundamentally matters is Relation R [psychologicalconnectedness and/or psychological continuity],with any cause.[14]

If identity is not to be defined in terms of thispsychological relationship between events then it isto be replaced, for all important purposes for whichwe might be interested in identity, by such arelationship.

Wollheim characterises such a theory aboutpersons as a constructionist theory, one that:

holds that everything that needs to be said aboutthe events that make up the life of a person -about, that is, such events taken singly - can be

said without introducing a person who has them. Ona constructionist theory a person arrives on thescene only when there is a set of suitablyinterrelated events, and then the person is or is notidentical with that set. The person appears deus ex machina, and the machina is the unity relation. Onsuch a theory to say of a single event that it is anevent in some person's life is just to say that it is amember of an appropriately interrelated set of events of the kind that make up a life.[15]

It is, however, not necessary for a constructionist









theory to be psychological in nature for Wollheimadmits the possibility of a constructionist theory of persons in terms of corporeal or physical relations.But it is psychological constructionist theories

which have dominated recent discussions, and suchtheories raise two separate questions. The first iswhether or not such a theory of persons could everbe sufficient or adequate or even coherent. Thesecond is whether such a theory must be assumedby the thought-experimental methodology, whetherthere is an inherent and vicious circularity at work here.

IV

A major ontological problem is raised bypsychological constructionism as it stands, for itseems to allow the possibility that there could exista psychological event of the kind that normallymakes up a person's life which has no relation oronly an inadequate relation of the designated kindto other such events. In other words, it might bepossible for such an event to exist without being

part of someone's life. On the strongest view, thisclaim amounts to believing in the possibleexistence of a thought or a memory or a belief which did not belong in some fashion to a thinker ora rememberer or a believer. Such a situation raisesall kinds of difficulties. There is the ontological oneof trying to decide just what kind of entity athinker-less thought or feeler-less feeling might be,and the metaphysical embarrassment such a

situation would cause is perhaps illustrated by thedying words of Dickens' Mrs. Gradgrind: "I think there's a pain somewhere in the room, but Icouldn't positively say that I have got it"![16]Thereis the logical problem of whether or not it is adefining characteristic of a memory that it beremembered by a rememberer, of whether we areuttering a contradiction in asserting the possibilityof a memory unrememberable in principle because

inadequately related to a sufficient set of psychological events. There is the causal problem





of just how such unrelated events originate theirexistence. No doubt there are other problems too.What is certain is that any theory which allows eventhe possibility of such unowned psychological

events must be seriously flawed, to say the least.

A further problem for constructionism can begenerated if we accept Wollheim's psycho-analytically influenced view of the mind, for hedistinguishes between mental events (which are"episodic or transient phenomena") and mentaldispositions which

are persistent phenomena, which manifest

themselves intermittently. They do not occur, norare they events. They are mutable. Dispositionshave histories, which are made up of events, andthese histories are varied. Dispositions differ fromone another in their beginnings, for some areinnate, some arise in the mind, and some areacquired. They persist in different ways, for someremain constant and some change, and they maymature or decline or fluctuate. And dispositions

differ in their ends, for some last out the personand some come to an end within his life, and theymay do so through decay, or throughconsummation, or they may be eradicated.[17]

Much of this might seem unarguable to anyoneinterested in human psychology but Wollheimdraws a conclusion based upon theinterrelationship of the episodic and the persistent,for it is this interrelationship upon which he insists.

Although dispositions (or rather, their histories) aremade up out of mental events, mental statesdepend upon and are characterised by mentaldispositions in their turn. Without entering toodeeply upon the ontological status of mentaldispositions, it has to be said that dispositions mustbe housed in or owned by something. Thealternative is a variation on our previousontological nightmare, the possibility of 'free-

floating' mental dispositions. The most plausible





candidate for owner of a mental disposition is aperson, or at least a person's mind. Since it is notpossible to characterise fully a mental eventwithout taking into account its interrelationship

with a mental disposition, and it is not possible tocharacterise a mental disposition without referenceto its owner, it is therefore not possible to agreewith Parfit's claim that "we can refer to theseexperiences, and fully describe the relationsbetween them, without claiming that theseexperiences are had by a person."[18]

Another problem for the psychologicalconstructionist is raised by the very nature of the

mental events chosen as criterial to establish thedesired relationship of psychological connectednessand/or continuity. Although the relationship hasbeen assumed to hold between mental events ingeneral, it has been the tradition amongstconstructionist theorists of personal identity sincethe time of Locke to take memory as the significanttype of mental event. More specifically, sincemodern epistemological writing has started to

concentrate on an analysis of the phenomenon of memory into different types,[19] psychologicalconstructionists have now adopted personal orexperiential memory as the significant mentalevents out of which lives are to be constructed, aclassification at least implicit in Locke's view that:

as far as this consciousness can be extendedbackwards to any past action or thought, so far

reaches the identity of that person: it is the sameself now it was then and it is by the same self withthis present one that now reflects on it, that thataction was done. [20]

The use of experiential memory as the definitionalform of mental events out of which persons' livesare to be constructed raises a number of problems.The first is a blatant circularity which we saw aboveraised by Butler and headed off by Shoemaker's

invention of quasi-memory, a redefinition in terms









of its not being necessary for the apparentrememberer of an experience to be the person whohad that experience. The second arises from thistactic, for memory is fundamental to our

epistemological abilities, to our very ability tooperate as cognitive beings with a temporaldimension. But there are serious doubts as towhether quasi-memory could fulfil this function.Shoemaker himself had recognised that there wereepistemological problems with q-memory [21] andWiggins has explored the difficulty of accommodating q-memory with our generalepistemological practices.[22] I have drawn out

some of these epistemological consequenceselsewhere[23] and can summarise them here byclaiming that experiential memory is foundationalto our epistemological practice because of theguaranteed relationship of identity that holdsbetween the rememberer and the experiencer of that being remembered. Quasi-memory, where weallow it to have any extension greater than that of memory, does not guarantee this relationship and

so inevitably undermines the foundational role of memory and ultimately our ability to know anythingdiachronically.

There is a third problem which tends to beconcealed by our concentration upon memory as anepistemological tool. This concentration has beenfostered by empiricist views of the mental, whichhave tended to view experiential memory solely incognitive terms, as a method of acquiring

knowledge and beliefs about the past, and aboutour own past in particular. Wollheim asks us torecognise that there is to memory what he terms anaffective aspect. It is difficult to make specific whatthis claim entails but it certainly includes a claimthat individual memories have a character, which isgiven to them by our dispositions at the time whenwe had the original experience. When we rememberan experiential memory, it is not the case that we

just become aware of truths about our own past.Rather, we partake of the dispositional character of









our remembered past. There is thus an emotional oraffective dimension to our memory and it is thiswhich at least partly serves to relate our memoriesqua individual mental events with our dispositions

as persisting constituent features of our mentallife.[24] Such an affective dimension provides yetanother stumbling-block for the viability of quasi-memory. More importantly, it makes it even moredifficult to envisage individual memories ascharacterisable without reference to their owners.If the cognitive content of a memory may besufficiently abstracted from the particularity of arememberer, it seems much more unlikely that the

same could be possible for the affective content.For Wollheim these criticisms are sufficient torender untenable any constructionist view of theevents of a person's life and he insists that thefacts of the matter can only be adequatelydescribed by a non-constructionist theory,

a theory that maintains that no event in a person'slife, even taken singly, can be adequately described

without introducing the person who has it. There isalways some person who integrally enters into anyevent that is of the kind that makes up the life of aperson.[25]

Such a view would seem to entail that a person'slife is an organic whole. Not only would a person'smental life be an organic whole, making itimpossible to isolate and fully describe any singlemental event without reference to that mental life

as a whole, but it might be impossible to isolate themental from the person's life as a whole, theirexistence as a living acting physical organism. Thisposition is directly contrary to the neo-Humeanismimplicit in the reductionism of writers like Parfit, areductionism which seeks to reduce mental life toan aggregate or 'bundle' of separate and separatelydescribable mental events. Reductionism heredepends upon confusing the nature of a person

with the nature of a person's life. That the latter







may be seen for some purposes as a sequence of temporal events, each one an aggregate of mentalor other events, provides no grounds for theassumption that the person themselves can be

identified with this sequence.

V

Though Wollheim may be right in his criticisms of constructionist views of personal identity, this doesnot of itself entail that there is a strict circularityinvolved in these views or the associatedmethodology used to support them. We might drawhis criticisms out like this. Parfit believes that if we

start from a neutral standpoint, one involving noprejudgments, and contemplate a series of thoughtexperiments then these will elicit from withinourselves certain intuitions that we haveconcerning our own nature. Although initially theseintuitions will be coloured by our holding certain of what Unger refers to as metaphysical doctrinesconcerning the self (its necessary unity, privacy,etc.),[26] a sufficiently wide-ranging series of

thought experiments will tend to undermine theinfluence of these doctrines and we will come torecognise the importance of survival throughpsychological continuity, even or especially inhypothetical situations where identity fails orcannot be decided. This should lead us to arecognition that in situations where we mightordinarily be satisfied that personal identity holdsby virtue of some other criteria, what is or ought to

be of significance to us is the relationship of psychological continuity.

But Wollheim's criticism leads to the charge thatParfit's thought experiments in themselvespresuppose a relational or Humean view of personalidentity. The thought experiments are set up sothat the only data allowed are the facts concerningexperiences and the causal relationships holdingbetween them. Given that these hypothetical

situations are steeped in a Humean ontology, it is





therefore no surprise if only Humean conclusionscan be drawn from them. For Wollheim there are noneutral standpoints available, and we enter eachhypothetical situation laden down with pre-existing

theory. Thus the assumption that all that issignificant or desirable or essential in a humanbeing, all that makes one a person, can be capturedentirely in terms of psychological states andcharacteristics, is one that needs to be examinedmost carefully. Wollheim would wish to know, for astart, if 'psychological states and characteristics'include dispositions. More importantly, we wouldhave to make clear at least to ourselves exactly

what sort of ontological implications the claimentails. Are we asserting a total ontologicalindependence, believing that a person continues toexist as long as their psychological states andcharacteristics continue to exist, even if thesefeatures are no longer embodied in a human being?Or a more limited ontological independence, withthe person continuing to exist as long as thepsychological features continue to exist in some

form of embodiment even if not in the same humanbody? Or can we still make an assertion of psychological predominance from within anontology in which all such psychological featuresare necessarily embodied and may necessarily haveto be embodied within the same human beingacross time?

It seems fairly clear that Parfit does not wish toendorse the kind of dualism that would almost

certainly be entailed by the first position here. Justas certainly, he does not wish to adopt any positionlike the latter which would subordinatepsychological criteria to physical or organic criteria.[27] Exactly what conditions of embodiment hewould require remains unclear. Throughout histhought experiments the essential psychologicalcharacteristics which compose a person necessitatethe existence of a brain, or at least part of a brain,

or at least a duplicate brain or part thereof.Whether Parfit would regard as acceptable Unger's





thought experiment in which persons can survivethrough taping, which amounts to Parfit'steletransportation but with a substantial temporalgap between the dissolution of the original person

and the creation of the duplicate during which theperson exists (or perhaps only 'exists') as a set of coded information stored on tape, is not certain.[28]What does seem clear is that Parfit iscommitted to an atomistic view of humanpsychology, a view that human mental features canbe discriminated and fully described without theneed for any reference to an owner of eachparticular mental feature.

Perhaps we should remind ourselves of what Parfitdoes hold. He states in Reasons and Persons that:

I am not a series of experiences, but the personwho has these experiences. A Reductionist canadmit that, in this sense, a person is what hasexperiences, or the subject of experiences. This istrue because of the way in which we talk. What aReductionist denies is that the subject of

experiences is a separately existing entity , distinctfrom a brain and body, and a series of physical andmental events.[29]

What Parfit is denying here is not only Cartesiandualism but also the existence of the kind of separate thinking substance in which Locke appearsto believe.[30] We have no quarrel with this. ButParfit appears to be denying a great deal more.Taking his thought experiments as a whole, no

particular brain or body appears to be necessary forsustaining the existence of a person. What isnecessary for Parfit is the continuing series of mental events. Provided this series continues, wemay contemplate any amount of alteration orinterruption of the physical events which in somesense or other sustain it, even down to the massivespatial interruption of so-called teletransportation.If this is so, then it is hard to see that Parfit can

attribute much importance to the distinction









between a series of experiences and the personwho has the experiences, for the total effect of hiscollection of hypothetical cases is to deny orminimise the ontological importance of every type

of fact except the series of experiences, of mentalevents. We cannot therefore be blamed for readingParfit as though the series were the person, for heleaves us with no other ground on which to stand.

Parfit states that he will argue for the conclusionthat:

Different experiences are had by the sameperson....And we can refer to these experiences,

and fully describe the relations between them,without claiming that these experiences are had bya person.[31]

but he seems to rest this conclusion primarily uponthe logical acceptability of notions like quasi-memory and its sibling, quasi-intention, and uponarguments like Lichtenberg's against the Cartesianbelief in Pure Ego or thinking substance, concluding

Because we ascribe thoughts to thinkers, we cantruly claim that thinkers exist. But we cannotdeduce, from the content of our experiences, that athinker is a separately existing entity. And, asLichtenberg suggests, because we are notseparately existing entities, we could fully describeour thoughts without claiming that they havethinkers. We could fully describe our experiences,and the connections between them, without

claiming that they are had by a subject of experiences. We could give what I call animpersonal description. [32]

There is a substantial ambiguity involved here. IsParfit claiming that we could fully describe thetotality of our thoughts without claiming that theyhave thinkers? If so then this raises the problem of individuation, of what makes any mental particulara member of this set of thoughts rather than of some other set. Some of this set of mental events,







for instance the perceptions and perceptualmemories, are going to be broadly consistent with asingle spatio-temporal locus of experience movingthrough the physical world, and so are going to be

broadly consistent with each other. But anysufficiently large set of mental particulars is goingto be less than maximally consistent, due to thepresence of false and delusive memories,imaginings, misrememberings and so on. Sointernal consistency is always going to besuggestive rather than decisive, and so is alwaysgoing to be a less than sufficient condition formembership of the set. If we insist that a full

description of our mental particulars provide atleast some basis for an explanation of how anyparticular mental individual is a member of one setrather than another, then it is hard to see how sucha demand could be fulfilled without reference to theset's owner, to the thinker of these thoughts. It is,of course, open to Parfit to claim that individuatingsets of mental particulars and providingmembership conditions for mental individuals ought

not to be part of a full description of mentalparticulars. But such a position must inevitablyweaken the attractiveness of Parfit's analysis incomparison with those philosophical psychologieswhich claim to be able to provide such conditions.

Or is Parfit claiming that we can give a fulldescription of each individual thought withoutassuming that it has a thinker? We have alreadynoticed the ontological implausibilities of thinker-

less thoughts. Perhaps, therefore, we should readthis as the claim that we can give a full descriptionof each individual thought without assuming that itbelongs to any particular thinker. It is precisely thisclaim that Wollheim denies, insisting that a fullcharacterisation of individual mental events cannotbe given without reference to mental dispositions,mental entities which must themselves have anowner to account for their origin and temporal

persistence. Parfit's empiricist assumptions arenowhere more evident than in his attempt in



Reasons and Persons to make the phenomenon of quasi-memory appear credible.[33] He tells thehypothetical tale of Jane who is the beneficiary of asurgical transplant of some of Paul's memory-

traces. Paul has been to Venice and Jane hasn't, butnow it sometimes seems to her that she can recallthe sight of the piazzas, the sound of the seagullsswooping over the canals, and so forth. On thebasis of her knowledge that she has never been toVenice, Jane concludes that these are quasi-memories whose origin lies in Paul's perceptualexperiences. Throughout the thought experimentParfit seems to share

Ayer's overall view of memory..[as]..something thatis through and through cognitive. Memory is for himessentially the capacity to have beliefs of a certainkind - so that the crucial concession to wring fromepistemology is an account of those conditionsunder which such beliefs rise to the condition of knowledge.[34]

But experiential memory has an affective character

as well and Parfit nowhere considers just how theparticular affective character which Paul would giveto an experience of his as he experiences it wouldcohere with Jane's character when shesubsequently q-remembers it. I have elsewhereraised the knottier problem of mnemonicgeography, of the position of each particularmemory within our mnemonic faculty as a whole, of its relation to our other memories, and of the

difficulty of seeing just how this mnemonicgeography could be duplicated in many cases of quasi-memory where the mnemonic relation is torun across persons' lives.[35] Whether Jane knowswhat Paul knew may be of less importance thanwhether Jane can feel what Paul felt (and whetherthe two questions can genuinely be kept separate isone that Proust, for one, might wish to deny).Suppose that at the time of his visit to Venice Paul

was feeling a delight in Italian architecture, adistaste for seagulls, a dread of large expanses of









open water, a constant nagging feeling that hewould have enjoyed the trip more if his feet had notbeen constantly aching, and so on. Suppose, inother words, that Paul's immediate perceptual

experiences are mediated by more abstract andlong-term psychological states and dispositions.How much of Paul's affective response may weexpect Jane to undergo when she contemplates herPauline quasi-memories? Since it seems implausibleto claim that Jane's set of psychological states anddispositions would exactly match Paul's right downto his distaste for seagulls, the stage would appearto be set for a considerable amount of affective

dissonance here unless we grant quasi-memory apurely cognitive and informational role. Such amove would, of course, reduce quasi-memory to thestatus of a poor relation of real memory and onewhich could no longer fulfil all of Parfit'srequirements. These considerations tend to weakenParfit's case that any individual mental event canbe fully characterised without reference to itsowner or originator.

Given that Parfit continues to hold this contentiousposition throughout his examination of a variety of thought experiments, it is therefore hardlysurprising that in each case under considerationquestions of ownership of mental events are ruledout from the beginning. And it is no less surprisingthat the conclusions he draws seem to support anessential neo-Humeanism. The method of examination of continuity conditions for personal

identity via hypothetical cases and thoughtexperiments inevitably produces an emphasis uponpsychological continuity conditions which in thecircumstances of bizarre hypotheses lacking the all-round support of our existing conceptual framework can mislead us into the ill-founded assumption thatpsychological continuity conditions are sufficient orcan stand alone. When such a situation is combinedwith Parfit's neo-Humean insistence that

psychological events are individually fullycharacterisable without reference to their owners



then his conclusions appear inevitable. And so wesee the outlines emerging of what is a conceptualcircularity.

NOTES

1 John Locke, An Essay Concerning HumanUnderstanding, Book II, Ch. XXVII, Section 9.

2 Bishop Butler, Appendix to The Analogy of Religion (1736), reprinted in John Perry (ed.),Personal Identity , (Berkeley, University of CaliforniaPress, 1975), p.100.

3 See, for instance, the papers 'Personal Identity'

by H.P. Grice and 'The Soul' by Anthony Quinton,both reprinted in the Perry collection cited above.

4 For the first clear formulation of the idea of quasi-memory, together with a discussion of some of theproblems arising, see Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity , (Cornell, UniversityPress, 1963).

5 This pair of thought experiments is to be found in

Williams' paper 'The Self and the Future',Philosophical Review, Vol. 79 (1970), re-printed inhis Problems of the Self , (Cambridge, UniversityPress, 1973).

6 Mark Johnston, 'Human Beings', Journal of Philosophy , Vol. 84 (1987), p.71.

7 Mark Johnston, op. cit., p.63.

8 Mark Johnston, op. cit., pp.80-81.

9 Mark Johnston, op. cit., p.60.

10 Paul Snowdon, 'Personal Identity and BrainTransplants', in David Cockburn (ed.), HumanBeings, (Cambridge, University Press, 1991), p.125.

11 Richard Wollheim, The Thread of Life,(Cambridge, University Press, 1984), p.11. [Cited

below as Wollheim (1)]



12 Richard Wollheim, 'Memory, Experiential Memoryand Personal Identity' in MacDonald (ed.)Perception and Identity , (Cornell, University Press,1979), p.190. [Cited below as Wollheim (2)]

13 Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons, (Oxford,University Press, 1984), p.217.

14 Derek Parfit, op. cit., p.217.

15 Richard Wollheim (1), op. cit., p.16.

16 Charles Dickens, Hard Times (1854), p.224 inPenguin edition.

17 Richard Wollheim (1), op. cit., p.34.18 Derek Parfit, op. cit., p.217.

19 See, for instance, Norman Malcolm's 'ThreeLectures on Memory' (reprinted in his Knowledgeand Certainty , Englewood N.J., Prentice Hall, 1963.)or C. B. Martin and Max Deutscher's 'Remembering'(Philosophical Review, 1966, pp.161-196) for twodiffering but highly influential analyses of memory

and its contribution to epistemology.

20 John Locke, op. cit., Book II, Ch. XXVII, Section 9.

21 These were recognized by Shoemaker in his Self Knowledge and Self-Identity (cited above) and wereexplored more fully in his later paper 'Persons andTheir Pasts', American Philosophical Quarterly , Vol.7. (1970), pp.269-285.

22 David Wiggins has referred to these problems ina number of places. Perhaps the clearestformulation of his belief in the impossibility of founding a coherent epistemology upon quasi-memory is to be found in his unpublished paper'Remembering Directly'.

23 In an unpublished paper entitled 'Quasi-Memory:Its Epistemological Nature and Consequences'(University of London M.A. Dissertation, 1991).

24 It is perhaps surprising that this view of memory



is not emphasised more in philosophy since it isboth an orthodox and influential view inpsychology. It is, of course, this view of memorywhich Proust explores in A La Recherche du Temps

Perdu.


26 See Peter Unger, Identity, Consciousness and Value, (Oxford, University Press, 1990), p.36. forUnger's discussion of these doctrines.

27 See Derek Parfit, op. cit., pp.209ff.

28 See Peter Unger, op.cit., pp.4ff.


30 See John Locke, op. cit., Book II, Ch. XXVII,especially Sections 8 to 11.





35 In the paper cited in Note 23 above.

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