Desiderata For a Theory of Human Persons

In my dissertation, which is a critical survey of various theories in the ontology of persons, I begin by formulating the a set of hypotheses which I then use as reasons for rejecting various competing accounts of the ontology of persons. I am curious to get feed back on my formulation of the hypotheses. I intend each of them to be propositions that the majority of philosophers would agree upon. If anyone can think of others, I'd be interested to hear them:

The Psychological Continuity Hypothesis (PCH)

For any person, P, and any theory of persons, T, if T’s being true would make it (logically) possible for P to be identical with another being, B, such that (i) B is not psychologically continuous with P, or (ii) B has no psychological properties whatsoever, then

P has a reason to reject T’s being true.

The Non-Duplication Hypothesis (NDH)

For any person, P, and any time, t, and any theory of persons, T, if T’s being true entails that when P is thinking that p (where p is a sufficiently reflexive self-referential thought) at t, there is more than one being thinking that p at t, then P has a reason to reject T’s being true.

The Epistemic Hypothesis (EH)

For any person, P, and any theory of persons, T, if T’s being true would make it (logically) impossible for P to know what sort of thing P essentially is, then P has a reason to reject T’s being true.

The Anti-Nihilistic Hypothesis (ANH)

For any person P, and any theory of persons, T, if T’s being true would entail that P does not exist, then P has a reason to reject T’s being true.

The Commonsense Morality Hypothesis (CMH)

For any person P, and any theory of persons T, if T’s being true entail P’s rejecting Commonsense Morality, then P has a reason to reject T’s being true.

The Survival Hypothesis (SH)

For any person P, and any theory of persons T, if T’s being true entails that P must reject the (logical) possibility of P’s surviving the death of P’s body, then P has a reason to reject T's being true.

Wiki entry on John Corcoran

Some of our readers may be interested in a newly minted Wikipedia entry on Professor John Corcoran, the eminent logician, historian of logic, and philosopher of language, and long-time member of philosophy department at the University at Buffalo. I would be remiss if I failed to implore our readers, on John's behalf, to help out by correcting the Wiki-entry and updating wherever needed.

Lake Effect Philosophy Returns

Earlier in the summer I closed up the Buffalo Philosophy blog due to lack of interest/readership. Well...now I think I will give the blog a little more time to attract new readers and contributors. Ultimately I would like subsequent generations of Buffalo philosophy grad students to take over running the blog, but for now please check back in often as we here in buffalo try to get some interesting work out there. stay tuned...and welcome back to our blog.

Are we three dimensional like books?

Below is a short synopsis of what I have been thinking about this morning:

Recently, I was struck by remarks made by Gadamer about tarrying time and suggesting something roughly like ‘the past and future live in the present’। [The specifics of what Gadamer says, I think, are relatively unimportant with regard to what I will say, but thinking about what I will say in terms of the aforementioned slogan may be helpful].

Whatever it is that we, persons or the things thinking our thoughts right now, we are certainly not multiply located in space or in time। This is just what it is to have an identity and there is simple proof that it is true, of which I am confident that there is no counterexample. I will identify this evidence in the form of a question, which cannot be answered affirmatively: can you recall or imagine any situation in which you have been or could be conscious of being co-located? That is, can you imagine being conscious of your own being at two places or two times at once? Of course the answer here—if I may be so bold—is “no”. This I will take as good reason to believe that we, whatever we are made of, are three dimensional [at least phenomenologically speaking].

Now if all of that is true, and if we simply assume that the world is in fact three dimensional, we can imagine a three dimensional object—like a person—that the past and future ‘lives in’ [so to speak]।

In our participation in the temporality of things that seem to span across times we tarry historical time—it is sort of collapsed into our experience of the being of what we are experiencing। This idea is often explained in terms of experiencing a melody. When we are listening to a particular melody we do not hear the notes in isolation from each other, even though they reach our ears as discrete historical times. Rather, we hear the melody—we hear the prior notes and anticipate those to come—which has genuine temporal being [the melody is in the now with us whenever we are experiencing it] and which the historical past and future of live in its presentness. Assuming that we can make sense of that, for the sake of brevity, we can easily imagine a three dimensional thing that includes a history of events [much like we do].

Imagine that someone recorded every moment of their conscious life and in certain spots also recorded their dreams and future plans, from birth to death, in a book. That is, they took pictures and wrote descriptions of every moment in a very long journal. Upon finding and reading the book we would certainly not be able to read all of it instantaneously, just as the author could not when writing it. However, even though we can only experience one three dimensional part of the three dimensional book at any supposedly present moment this does not mean that the other parts of the book are at some location other than where we are when we are not reading them. The book is a complete history of a person’s temporality—of each of the perceived times when they were present—but the book is not four dimensional or at least it is possible to imagine a three dimensional book containing a complete history of a person [they are called biographies and many of them actually exist]. I submit that persons too, like the book, are three dimensional things containing a history of seemingly past events and anticipating seemingly future ones.

Some Ethical Problems for Materialist Theories of Persons

here are some arguments excerpted from a paper I will be giving this Friday at a conference on the Ethics of Organ Transplantation at The University of St. Thomas in Houston, TX.

What has all of this got to do with animalism and TEA? Well, modern physics tells us that, at the microphysical level, our bodies (i.e. our animals) are nothing more than dense cloud-like arrangements of particles. If this physical picture is true (and our best science confirms that it is), and if human persons are really just identical to their material bodies, then wherever a human person is present, there will be not just one thing, but very many, overlapping, perfectly viable person- like things present. And each of these person-like things will be just as capable of thinking as the others, in virtue of the fact that it will share all of the necessary parts depending on the manner in which its putative boundaries are gerrymandered.
In light of this picture, the animalist has just a few options for a plausible personal ontology. Either (a) she might imagine that the boundaries of the animal with which she is identical are vague boundaries, the sort of boundaries that fade out gradually instead of coming to a crisp end. (Van Inwagen 1990) or (b) she might suppose that the boundaries of the animal she is identical with are super-precise and that only one of the many things located where she is is fit to be called the animal to which she is identical (this is Merricks strategy); or (c) she might think that there are really very many distinct animal-like things (and ipso facto) very many distinct person-like things with distinct boundaries located where she is, each of which is such that it could equally well be called an animal or a person (Unger 2004).
If she takes option (c) then she is open to


The Ethical Argument Against Animalism (TEA-AA)
(1) The Animalist theory of persons entails that wherever any human person, P, is located, there is at least one other human-shaped thinking animal, A, such that A is located where P is located and A shares all of its parts with P, and P shares all of its parts with A.
(2) If (1) is true, then presumably, if P is worthy of ethical consideration, then A is worthy of ethical consideration.
(3) If (1) is true then presumably, when we remove an organ from P, we remove an organ from A as well.
(4) Presumably, we only get consent for the organ removal from P.
(5) Thus, necessarily if we remove A’s organ, then we do so without A’s consent.
(6) But removing A’s organ without A’s consent is unethical.
(7) Therefore if the animalist theory of persons is true, then organ removal and transplantation is necessarily unethical.
(8) But we do not believe that organ removal and transplantation is necessarily unethical.
(9) Therefore (from 7, 8) it is not the case that the animalist theory of persons is true.

Of course if the animalist rejects option (c) as most animalists would, then the TEA-AA will pose no problem for her, as she can simply deny TEA-AA 1. But then which of the other two options should she take?Suppose that the animalist endorses option (a). This gets her around the trouble of TEA-AA, true enough, but it does not get her out of ethical trouble altogether. After all, consider the following cognate argument

The Ethical Argument against Vague-Animalism (TEA-VA)
(1) The Vague-Animalist theory of persons entails that wherever any human person, P, is located, there is one and only one thinking thing located there, and its boundaries are vague.
(2) If (1) is true, then necessarily, for any time, t, and any hunk of matter, M, it will be vague whether M composes P at t or not.
(3) If (2) is true then necessarily, for any pair of times it will be vague whether P-at-t1 is identical to P-at-t2.
(4) Assume we get consent from P-at-t1 for the organ removal, but the organ is removed from P-at-t2.
(5) In that case it will be vague whether we have really gotten the consent of P-at-t2 beforehand.
(6) But removing P-at-t2’s organ without P-at-t2’s consent is unethical.
(7) Therefore if the vague-animalist theory of persons is true, then organ removal and transplantation is necessarily unethical.
(8) But we do not believe that organ removal and transplantation is necessarily unethical.
(9) Therefore (from 7, 8) it is not the case that the vague-animalist theory of persons is true.

the notion that underlies TEA and each of its cognate arguments is that whenever we take an organ from a thinking thing we must first get the consent of that thinking thing. It would be very bad for you if I could consent to you having your organ removed without your say so. Hence, if at any time t1….tn it is vague what hunks of matter do or do not compose an individual (at it surely must be, at all times, for individuals with vague boundaries), then if we get the consent of P at t1 the identity of P at t1 will necessarily be vague (since P is nothing more than a hunk of matter, and that hunk of matter’s boundaries are necessarily vague on this theory). But if this true, and it is true that, when we remove the organ from P at t2, P’s identity at t2 is also vague, it follows that it will be a uncertain whether the individual that earlier consented to giving their organ is the same as the one that later gets its organ removed. But in order to be ethically sound when removing an individual's organs we need clear, non-vague, consent from that individual (assuming that they are living, thinking, entities) we cannot make do with vague consent. So it seems like (a) is not an option.

This leaves the animalist with option (b), namely that wherever a person is located there is just one arrangement of atoms that is identical the person, but there are lots of arrangements that are almost identical to the person.


The Ethical Argument against Super-Precise Animalism (TEA-SPA)
(1) The Super-Precise Animalist theory of persons entails that (i) for any human person, P, P is identical with one and only arrangement of atoms, (ii) and P’s boundaries are super-precise, and (iii) there are many arrangements, A1…An in vicinity of P that are almost but not quite identical with P.
(2) If (1) is true, then presumably, if P is worthy of ethical consideration, then A is almost worthy of ethical consideration.
(3) If (1) is true then presumably, when we remove an organ from P, we almost remove an organ from A as well.
(4) Presumably, we only get consent for the organ removal from P.
(5) Thus, necessarily if we remove A’s organ, then we do so without A’s consent.
(6) But removing A’s organ without A’s consent is unethical.
(7) Therefore if the animalist theory of persons is true, then organ removal and transplantation is necessarily unethical.
(8) But we do not believe that organ removal and transplantation is necessarily unethical.
(9) Therefore (from 7, 8) it is not the case that the animalist theory of persons is true.

What if the animalist adopts this approach? She would then say that there is only really one animal there, though there are lots and lots of things that are almost animals. I find this the least plausible option for the animalist to take. After all, there are lots of things of that are objects of ethical consideration that are much less like a human person than the almost but not quite human arrangements of atoms that the Super-precisionist theory posits. For instance, no one would think that was ethical (or sane) for me to go around removing the organs of dogs or cats or without their consent or that of their legal guardians. This being the case, why would I deny ethical status to these arrangements of atoms? Well, in the case of the dog, the super-precisionist would say, you have a super-precise living arrangement. But the almost human arrangements aren’t living like the dog. I find this hard to swallow. If they are not living, after all, why do they all go wherever I go? The right thing to say is perhaps that they are almost living and thus almost worthy of ethical consideration. At this point there is little to do but throw up one’s hands in frustration.

Thinking about Quinton’s “two-space paradox”

I have been thinking about Quinton’s “two-space paradox” recently and I think—with some minor theoretical embellishments—it shows that times and spaces are not continuous (at least not of any necessity) and are, rather, discrete। Below, after some preliminary remarks on our experience of times, I present a strengthened version of Quinton’s paradox, mostly just to see what the readers of this blog have to say about it and if they can offer any solution to it showing that it is consistent with time being continuous.

First: continuity of experience does not imply continuity of time…

It is obvious that continuity of experience (psychological, phenomenological, or whatever) does not imply continuity of time। To illustrate this point, assume that there is some event (E) that occurs more than once—we will just assume that we have some concept of some kind of absolute Newtonian/mathematical space-like extended empty time in which events can occur—at T* and at T**. Take (E) to be:

(E) the state of all of the properties of reality during some particular duration of events in which JFK is assasinated

So, (E) is a particular set of properties and relations।

Now imagine, as I have said, that (E) occurs at one time and then—by some magic or reconstitution or whatever—is instantiated again। So, we have:

(E) at T* and at some other time (E) at T**

Who would be able to discern between (E) at T* and (E) at T**? The answer, of course, is NOBODY BUT AN OBSERVER EXTERNAL TO WHAT WE SAY IS TIME whilst at (E) at T* and/or (E) at T** । That is, nobody included in (E) could distinguish between (E) at T* and (E) at T**.

*This is, I think, all fairly obvious, but needs to be accepted to accept the conclusion of Quinton’s paradox

Second: a new and (slightly) improved two-space paradox

Imagine that upon falling asleep you awake in some tropical paradise, in hut that you recognize to be your home and with a man/women you know to be your life-partner। In your dream you get out of bed and go to work, let’s say that you build canoes though you have a passion for physics and jogging. You complete a long 16hr day at work (you have a watch) and go home exhausted. Upon falling asleep you awake in what you have always considered to be your real life to find that you have been sleeping for 7hrs.

After going about your business in your ‘real life’ you go to sleep and again awake in your dream life and complete a work day and again upon going to sleep you awake in ‘real life’। This continues for several month—every night you live a day in dream-world and every night in dream-world you live a day in real-world. When you get injured in dream-world you have those injuries in that world and anything that happens in the real-world has the expected effects in that world (there is no crossover of causation so far as you can tell).

Now, you are curious both in real-world and in dream-world about your alternate life in your dreams and wonder how you can live a full day in your dreams while only being asleep for a few hours। In dream-world, since you are interested in physics, one day you work out some complicated calculation that takes you 20hrs to complete, even with you doing every part of the calculation perfectly. When you awake in real-world you wonder if maybe time in real-world just happens faster somehow and wonder if you would be able to complete the same calculation in less time. In real-world you practice the calculation to try to be able to do it very quickly, but no matter how hard you try you can never complete the calculation in less than 18hrs. So, how is it that your dream-self can complete this calculation in your dream that only takes 7hrs in real-world?

Now, because you are stubborn, you want to do another test। Because in both worlds you are fond of jogging you include this in your experiments. In real-world you run from city-x, where you live, to city-y which is very far away. It takes you 13hrs to get from city-x to city-y, even though you are very fit. Upon waking in dream-world you find that you have only been sleeping for 2hrs. Now you are convinced that the times in dream-world and real-world are not connected (mostly because you remember the pain of running so far in your dream and don’t feel like running that far again). So, again, how is it that your dream-self can complete actions in your real-self’s dream that only take a short time in real-world (respectively)?

And the finale:
In real world you are hit by a falling safe, you die in the real-world but upon becoming unconscious you awake in your bed in your tropical paradise and go off to build canoes. You—the canoe maker—cease to have dreams of your other life after that.

Language and Rationality and Doxastic Pluralism

Some talks I have been having recently with colleagues (both fellow grad students and professors) regarding the nature of language have prompted some interesting thoughts that I would like to share in order to get the feedback of our readership (all four of you).

I begin by noting some background points that I hope will clarify my thinking about language itself. I have lately come to hold that there is no single objective standard of rationality such as would allow persons engaged in radically opposed fundamental projects to critique one another. Consider the example of the debate between theists and atheists over the rationality of belief in God. The atheist, or at least the sort of atheist who agrees with J.L. Mackie (which is more common among laymen than philosophers these days), claims that such belief is irrational; while the theist, at least the sort of theist who agrees with Alvin Plantinga, typically maintains that her belief is in fact quite rational. In doing so both seem to be appealing to an objective standard of rationality, but how can they both appeal to the same standard with such clearly antimonious results?

Well, one of them could be objectively wrong, or both could be wrong, or it could be the case that neither is, strictly speaking, wrong. Now, I am not sure what sort of a metaphysical picture is entailed by the belief that some beliefs are, metaphysically, just “wrong”. But, I tend to think that this would imply a state of affairs analogous to moral realism. According to the moral realist there are genuinely irreducible “moral facts” about the world, and subsequently about which of our decisions are “right” and which are “wrong”; and these facts hold independently of our subjective judgments or perceptions regarding them. For our purposes we can call the relevant, analogous, view regarding the rationality or irrationality of a persons beliefs “doxastic realism”. The doxastic realist would say that there are genuinely irreducible “doxastic facts” about the world, and subsequently about which of our beliefs are “rational” and which are “irrational”; and these facts hold independently of our subjective judgments or perceptions regarding them. Perhaps most people would be tempted to hold a view like this, but it seems problematic to me. To mention just one trouble: it seems to me like the doxastic realist, like the moral realist, must add needlessly to her ontology; i.e., on top of the physical facts about the world she must add these strangely irreducible doxastic facts.

Setting aside doxastic realism, then, we should deal briefly with the claim that both the atheist and the theist could be wrong. Someone might say that our beliefs are simply never right. Or, in other words, they might hold that there is no such thing as “rationality” or “irrationality”. This “doxastic nihilism” is perhaps tempting, but I think there is a knockdown argument against it in the instrumental value of practical reason. Surely it is strong evidence against the doxastic nihilist that practical reason gets results.

Finally then we come to the latter option, perhaps neither the atheist nor the theist is wrong. How does this work? Well, we might imagine that rationality claims are always made relative to a context determined by the intention of the attributor. Thus the atheist, working in her own context, correctly claims that the theist is irrational, while the theist, working in another, fundamentally separate, context correctly believes that she is not irrational. I call this view "doxastic pluralism".

In presenting this view to my colleagues I have maintained my belief in the irreducible subjectivity of the subject. What does this mean? Namely, that we each live in a world unto ourselves. And ultimately, while we can share in the fundamental projects of others (and even critique their rationality insofar as we share their projects), we remain somewhat isolated from others. Put shortly, every woman is an island to herself.

Now the object readily comes, what about language? Doesn’t language allow us, or better still doesn’t it require us, to shed our isolation?

My answer is yes and no. I prefer a Russellian account of language wherein there is a surface structure to the sentences we utter and a deeper logical structure. But I take it even further. I believe that while we can and do get by on “trading” or swapping these surface structures in every day discourse, nevertheless at a deeper level everything we utter is tinged with our individual subjectivity. When Robert Frost writes:

“The woods are lovely, dark and deep.”

I contend, that he what he writes means something very different to him than it does to me, his reader. Indeed, on my lips his poem acquires entirely new context, and therefore new meaning.
So it is with all language use, I believe. Words are symbols that we throw out almost in a magical way, like incantations, or prayers, in the hopes that others will comprehend enough of our meaning to do what we require of them in response. I was pleased to find out the other day that the Latin “ora” from which we get “orator” and “oratory”, means “to pray”. Apparently I am not the first to have thought in this odd way.