folk concepts of person and identity: a response to nichols and bruno
TRANSCRIPT
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This is the penultimate draft of a paper that is forthcoming in Philosophical Psychology.
Renatas Berniunas & Vilius Dranseika
Folk Concepts of Person and Identity: a Response to Nichols and Bruno
Abstract:
In a paper in Philosophical Psychology, Nichols & Bruno (2010) claim that the folk judge that
psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. In this article we attempt to evaluate this
claim. First, we argue that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations
folk do not use a unitary concept of personal identity but rely on different concepts of a person and
of identity of an individual. Identity can be ascribed even when post-transformation individuals are
no longer categorized as persons. Second, we provide new empirical evidence suggesting that (if we
assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that folk judgments about identity can be read off their use
of proper names) psychological continuity is not considered by the folk to be necessary for an
individual to be placed in a category of person and for ascribing identity over time and
transformations. Furthermore, we raise some doubts about the ability of current experimental
designs to adequately distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity judgments. We
conclude that these claims give us a good reason to be skeptical about prospects of using folk
intuitions in philosophical theorizing about personal identity.
Keywords: Folk Concepts, Intuitions, Personal Identity, Person, Experimental Philosophy
1. Introduction
The problem of personal identity is one of the truly perennial problems in philosophy. This
traditional problem boils down to the question of what is required for a person to persist over time,
that is, what is needed for a person A at a time t1 to be numerically identical with a person B at a
time t2. It is commonplace to suggest that throughout the history of Western philosophy there have
been, in one form or another, three main criteria of personal identity (Perry, 1975; Parfit, 1984;
Martin & Barresi, 2006; Olson, 2010; Nichols & Bruno, 2010). Namely, it has been claimed that
either the continuity of essential self, psychological continuity or bodily continuity is necessary in
order for person A at a time t1 and person B at a time t2 to be the same person.
Historically, various notions of the essential self (e.g. immaterial soul) dominated Western
philosophy (Martin & Barresi, 2006). However, by the end of the 17th century John Locke
(1975/1690) made a strong case for the psychological view. He argued that it is not immaterial and
immutable substance but memory that ensures the continuity of a person. In the 20th century
philosophy this view seems to have become the dominant one (for instance, see influential work by
Derek Parfit, 1984)1.Contemporary professional philosophers recently surveyed by David Bourget
and David J. Chalmers (2013) were more likely to lean toward or accept the psychological view
than any other view of personal identity.
The problem of personal identity is one of the problems in which thought experiments are
extensively used by philosophers to explicate and support their theoretical positions. It is sometimes
assumed that the method of thought experimentation can help to elicit the ‘right’ intuitions about
cases and thus play at least some role in justifying philosophical theories. However, the relationship
between philosophical theories and intuitions elicited by hypothetical cases2 is far from clear and
simple. First, it is controversial to what extent philosophical theories of personal identity are (or
should be) based on intuitions about hypothetical cases. Second, little is known about intuitive
judgments about hypothetical cases. For example, it is not clear whether different thought
experiments tend to elicit conflicting intuitions or whether there is an underlying unity within
intuitions. The two points are related: if philosophical theories of personal identity should be based
on intuitions about hypothetical cases, it is important to know what those intuitions are.
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The first point is a complex meta-philosophical question, and although we will not attempt
to address it in much detail, we will raise some skeptical concerns about using folk intuitions in
philosophical theorizing about personal identity. The second point seems to be amenable to
empirical analysis. However, there is little empirical data available on intuitive judgments about
thought experiments related to personal identity. To the best of our knowledge, “Intuitions about
personal identity: An empirical study”―an article by Shaun Nichols and Michael Bruno (2010)―is
the only publication within philosophy that has attempted to address this problem empirically. Also,
there is a small body of literature in psychology that directly addresses folk intuitions about
personal identity. For example, Blok, Newman, Behr, and Rips (2001); Blok, Newman, and Rips
(2005, 2007); and Liittschwager (1994) document cases where people assert individual continuity
without asserting continuity of personhood, and White (2009) in her studies on reincarnation beliefs
found that psychological continuity is thought to be preserved to a larger extent than identifying
bodily features. The current paper attempts to add to this line of research by presenting new
empirical data and drawing some philosophical and methodological implications of this new
research.
Nichols and Bruno summarize their strategy in the following way:
We have not attempted to defend the role of intuitions in assessing theories of personal
identity. Rather, we have tried to show that if it is appropriate for philosophers to rely
on intuitions in assessing theories of personal identity, then it will help to identify which
intuitions are especially robust. If intuitions are supposed to guide theory building, then,
ceteris paribus, intuitions that are more robust ought to be given more weight. […]
Over the course of our experiments, we found that intuitions favoring a psychological
approach to personal identity are resilient across significant changes in the cases (2010,
p. 306-307).
It is not entirely clear what Nichols and Bruno mean by ‘robustness of intuitions’ but it seems that
they take it to mean ‘resilience of intuitions across significant changes in the cases’, that is, the fact
that the same intuitions are evoked by significantly different hypothetical cases of transformations
is a good measure of ‘robustness’. Thus, the structure of their argument is as follows:
(1) If it is appropriate to rely on folk intuitions in assessing theories of personal identity,
then, ceteris paribus, folk intuitions that are more robust ought to be given more weight
in assessing theories of personal identity.
(2) Folk intuitions favoring a psychological approach to personal identity are especially
robust.
(3) Therefore, if it is appropriate to rely on folk intuitions in assessing theories of
personal identity, then, ceteris paribus, folk intuitions favoring a psychological
approach to personal identity ought to be given especially much weight in assessing
theories of personal identity.
Claim (2) is an empirical claim and most of the article by Nichols and Bruno deals with
adducing empirical evidence in support of this claim. Empirical evidence comes from three types of
studies. First [Lockean frame], Nichols and Bruno adapted experimental design from psychologists
Blok, Newman, and Rips (2005) and tested whether continuity of memory is deemed necessary for
identity preservation in cases where brain is transplanted into an artificial body (more on this in
Section 3). Second [Abstract frame], they asked their subjects an abstract question about what is
required for a personal identity over time. Third [Reflexive equilibrium], they gave subjects an
abstract question together with a case that usually elicits anti-psychological intuitions,3 then they
drew their subjects’ attention to a potential conflict between psychological and anti-psychological
intuitions and asked to choose between them. According to Nichols and Bruno, all three types of
studies provided support to the view that folk consider psychological continuity necessary for
preservation of personal identity.4
In this article we attempt to test the claim (2). We challenge this claim in two ways. First, we
provide new empirical evidence suggesting that (if we assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that
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folk judgments about identity can be read off their use of proper names, see Section 5)
psychological continuity is not considered by the folk to be necessary for identity preservation.
Second, we identify and discuss some conceptual problems related to the interpretation of
experimental data on intuitions on personal identity. More specifically, we suggest―on the basis of
our results and results by Blok, Newman, Behr, and Rips (2001) and Jean Liittschwager (1994)
―that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations, folk do not use a
unitary concept of personal identity but rather rely on two separate concepts―person and what we
call identity of an individual. The concept person is a rather general concept that deals with what is
needed for some individual to be considered a person (either in terms of necessary and sufficient
conditions or, perhaps, a possibility mentioned by Alvin Goldman (1993, p. 340), in terms of
prototypical features). This concept is typically concerned with persons at a specific time, i.e. in a
synchronic perspective – is some entity a person? Whereas the philosophical notion of personal
identity introduces a diachronic perspective and deals with a question of what might be necessary
and sufficient for someone to be the same person over time and/or transformations. Note, this
traditional way of stating the question of personal identity presupposes a rather thick notion of
identity which requires that both earlier and later individuals be categorized as persons. However,
there is some evidence indicating that people can employ a thinner notion of identity to track the
identity of an individual through a transformation even if that individual, while being understood as
a person before the transformation, is no longer deemed to be a person after the transformation (see
Section 5 for more detailed description of these two senses of identity).5 This last point also has
broader implications for Nichols and Bruno’s claim (1). If there is no folk concept of personal
identity (or at least if it is not used in thinking about hypothetical cases), it is unlikely that
philosophical theories of personal identity can draw much direct support from folk intuitions about
hypothetical cases of transformations.
Finally, it is important to emphasize the distinction between numerical and qualitative
identity (this distinction is presented in more detail in Section 6). Nichols and Bruno did emphasize
this important distinction, but we have suspicions that this distinction was not sufficiently
controlled in the design of their studies. For instance, in the study using Abstract frame the
participants received a description that included the following question: “what is required for some
person in the future to be the same person as you?” (2010, p. 304). We provide some empirical
grounds to suspect that the phrase ‘the same person’ could have been read by the participants in a
qualitative sense. We use these results to suggest a possibility that the prominence of psychological
intuitions in some of the previous studies can be partly due to the subjects understanding the
identity probe in a qualitative way (contrary to the experimenters’ intentions). Given this set up, the
paper will be structured as follows: in Section 2 we will present an empirical study that employs the
standard cognitive anthropological method of free-listing. This is a simple but powerful tool to tap
into particular folk conceptual domains from an emic perspective. These qualitative data will
provide a general conceptual framework of folk concept of person, from which we can construct
etic categories and design more controlled studies. In Section 3 we will replicate (and expand) a
study done by Blok, Newman, and Rips (2005), that was also replicated by Nichols and Bruno
(2010), and we will discuss it critically. In Section 4 we will report a study that attempts to directly
test the role of bodily continuity and social/moral information in a scenario where psychological
continuity is radically disrupted. In Section 5 we will discuss results that suggest that people can use
a notion of identity in a thinner manner than the philosophers’ notion of personal identity. Section 6
addresses the semantic ambiguity of the word ‘the same’ between its numerical and qualitative
readings and potential implications of this ambiguity to the interpretation of empirical results.
Finally, in section 7 the results of the current set of studies are summarized and some philosophical
and methodological implications are drawn.
2. The Structure of the Folk Concept ‘Person’: Free-listing
We decided to extract the structure of the folk concept of person by borrowing one of the traditional
methods in cognitive anthropology – free-listing. It is especially useful in that it allows the
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researcher to familiarize him/herself with the concepts shared and used by the respondents
themselves (see de Munck, 2009, Ch. 3). The method has been used extensively by anthropologists
to probe the conceptualization of such diverse cultural domains as romantic love (de Munck,
Korotayev, de Munck, & Khaltourina, 2011) or color terms (Bolton, Curtis, & Thomas, 1980), but,
as far as we know, as of yet it was not used by experimental philosophers. Free-listing allows one to
describe the conceptual domain from an emic perspective (that is, formulated in the language used
by the members of a cultural group under study rather than by the researchers and experts). It is a
snapshot of the most salient features of the concept under investigation. Emic data can be useful in
themselves and they also can be quantified and structured into etic (that is, formulated in the
language used by the social scientists) categories.
2.1. Method
Participants were recruited from undergraduate courses at Vilnius University, Lithuania. Students
were from different study programs, including Medicine, Psychology, Journalism, Mathematics,
Sociology and others. Two versions of the study question were distributed randomly (in total N =
100). The reason for two versions was to collect a broader range of responses. Specifically, one
version asked to list properties of persons, the other asked to list constituent components or parts of
persons. All materials used in this and other studies were in Lithuanian language. Lithuanian
materials were translated into English by both authors separately and remaining differences were
settled by discussion. Oral back translation by a third person not familiar with the aim of the study
was arranged.
The probing question is provided below (differences among the two versions are shown in
the brackets):
Please list all the things you know that are characteristic of persons, that are their properties
or features [that constitute persons, that are their parts or components]. Please make an
effort to list as many items as you can. There are no correct or incorrect answers, please list
all the things that, in your opinion, should be considered as properties [constitutive parts] of
persons.
x is a person if x has the following properties [is constituted by] ...
The question was followed by a numbered list (12 items) to be filled in by the respondent with a
note that one can continue the list as needed.
2.2. Results and Discussion
Analysis of data with a software program ANTHROPAC6 revealed that in the original emic version
of the results there were 407 unique terms in total. Some terms were either synonymous or
superfluously formulated, therefore we ran through the lists to reduce the number of terms by
unifying synonyms, where appropriate, changing from singular to plural and vice versa, checking
for typos etc. Unified data-sheets were re-analyzed by ANTHROPAC to recover frequencies. Very
similar patterns of responses emerged from both versions of the list question. Therefore, all
responses were combined into a single data-sheet and re-analyzed by ANTHROPAC listing terms
by frequency of their mention. In a reduced version there were 222 unique terms (816 instances in
total). We further analyzed those terms that were mentioned at least 5 times or more (focusing on
the most frequently mentioned items is a standard way of analysis, see de Munck, 2009). This
resulted in 49 items. See Table 1 for the most frequently mentioned terms.
[Insert Table 1 approximately here]
The most frequently mentioned terms reveal a very complex conceptual landscape with
terms covering a wide variety of aspects of personhood, from familiar psychological functions and
states to bodily functions and organs, to social interactions, and to the soul. In order to be able to
use the data for hypothesis generation we grouped the terms into different clusters. Each of us
grouped the terms separately and identified rather similar sets of clusters, while the remaining
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differences were resolved through discussion. First, we distinguished three clusters corresponding
to the three historically important features of the person used in philosophical discussions on
personal identity. This three-way categorization is also used by Nichols and Bruno (2010, p. 296).
That is, (1) terms pertaining to psychological functioning (‘thinking’, ‘feelings’, ‘character’,
‘emotions’ etc.); (2) terms pertaining to bodily functioning and structure (‘body’, ‘being alive’,
‘brain’, ‘organs’ etc.); and (3) terms pertaining to essential self, like ‘soul’ and ‘spirit’. This left us
with approximately 30 % of terms uncategorized. We grouped the remaining terms into additional
three categories: (4) terms pertaining to sociality and communication (‘communication’, ‘links with
others’, ‘friendship’ etc.); (5) terms pertaining to the minimal self, both as a subject of experience
and as a locus of action (‘agency’, ‘self-awareness’, ‘freedom’ etc.); and (6) terms pertaining to
morality (‘conscience’, ‘morals’, ‘responsibility’ etc.). See Figure 1 for details.
[Insert Figure 1 approximately here]
We fully realize that our grouping is somewhat arbitrary and that it is not possible to derive
very strict distinctions from qualitative emic data. However, it serves as a useful tool to grasp the
main components of the conceptual structure of category ‘person’ and use them as a source for
further research. Still, free-listing revealed a rather rich conceptual structure, comprising a variety
of components. Some of them are familiar from the debates on criteria of personal identity, some
are less familiar. This may mean that the folk (in our case Lithuanian students) rely on rich and
diverse conceptual resources when thinking about issues connected to personhood.
Since three conceptual clusters correspond to the earlier mentioned features of a person, we
will briefly discuss three other, less familiar, conceptual clusters. First, an emergence of terms
pertaining to the minimal self is intriguing. Interestingly, it echoes some observations made by
cognitive anthropologist Roy D’Andrade. He noticed that in the folk model of the mind there is a
minimal notion of the self that combines an active causal agent that intends, thinks or desires, and a
passive experiencer (a subject) that receives sensations, perceptions etc. (D’Andrade 1987, p.118).
Also, philosopher Shaun Gallagher (2000) in his review of the concept of self in philosophy and
cognitive science distinguished and described the notion of the minimal self (see also Knobe &
Nichols (2011) for an intriguing experimental exposition of a minimal agentic self in folk
conceptions of free will). It seems that free-listing results support the idea that people have a
complex concept of the minimal self that is not reducible to psychological or bodily states, but
functions as a separate cluster.
Second, an emergence of the social dimension is also intriguing. It has been documented by
anthropologists and cross-cultural psychologists that people in non-Western cultures conceptualize
persons as strongly interdependent beings and that it is mostly in Western countries, especially the
USA, where psychological states related to intentional agency (like one’s goals, desires, or beliefs)
are strongly emphasized (e.g. Ewing, 1990; Geertz, 1974; Harris, 1989; Markus & Kitayama, 1991;
Nisbett, Peng, Choi, & Norenzayan, 2001). Moreover, even among Western countries there is a
considerable variation of self-conceptions. For instance, South European countries or lower social-
economic classes more often tend to conceive persons not only as autonomous psychological agents
but also as social agents, through relations to others (for review see Markus & Kitayama, 1991).
Third, perhaps the most surprising result was an emergence of the moral dimension. The
importance of moral considerations in folk reasoning is an interesting research prospect. Indeed,
Joshua Knobe, the most ardent proponent of this idea argued that “people’s moral judgments can
actually influence the intuitions they hold both in folk psychology and in causal cognition” (2010,
p. 315). Perhaps moral considerations also influence the intuitions about personhood and identity?
From free-listing results we cannot get a clear understanding of particular situations where different
conceptual clusters that emerged in the study are relevant for thinking about personhood and
identity, but studies in the next two sections will include some possible contexts. Nichols and Bruno
in their experiments on personal identity attributions investigate the influence of two of the six
conceptual clusters – bodily functioning and structure, and psychological functioning. In addition to
that, we attempt to test the influence of two more conceptual clusters – sociality and
communication, and morality (Sections 3 and 4). The remaining two – the essential self and the
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minimal self – are more difficult to investigate and we leave them for future research. We also
return to the results of the free-listing study in Section 7, where we propose a working model that
depicts interaction of concepts of person and identity of an individual in folk thinking about
transformations.
3. The Critical Role of Psychology: The Brain Transplantation
The paper by Nichols and Bruno purports to show that folk intuitions fit with the psychological
approach to personal identity, where the psychological theory of personal identity is described as
maintaining that “persistence or continuity of distinctive psychological factors is necessary for
persistence of self” (2010, p. 299). In another place they narrow down this theory to memory and
argue that psychological criterion “holds that memory-preservation is necessary for persistence”
(2010, p. 300).7
In order to assess the psychological view Nichols and Bruno replicated a study by Blok,
Newman, and Rips (2005). The study included a scenario describing Jim, an accountant who gets
severely injured in a car accident, and the procedure of transplantation of his brain into an artificial
body (see 3.1 for details). However, there was one interesting manipulation, the brain in the
artificial body either preserved or lost previous memories. The study asked the subjects to evaluate,
among other things, if the patient is ‘still Jim’. Nichols and Bruno replicated the results and found
that “people tended to agree with the claim that it was ‘still Jim’ when the memories were
preserved, but disagreed with the claim that it was ‘still Jim’ when the memories were erased”
(2010, p. 299). They concluded that “responses participants gave accord with a psychological
criterion that holds that memory-preservation is necessary for persistence” (2010, p. 300).
3.1. Method
With an aim to replicate the studies by Blok, Newman, and Rips (2005) and Nichols and Bruno
(2010) we adapted one of their vignettes to Lithuanian context by changing the name of the main
character and the name of the town mentioned in the story (initially we recruited 283 participants;
40 participants failed to respond correctly to the comprehension check question, therefore they were
eliminated from further analyses, resulting in N = 243, 72% female, age M = 20). The first two
vignettes were designed to check the effect of memory retention (differences between the two
vignettes are shown in the brackets):
Jonas is an accountant living in Vilnius. One day, he is severely injured in a tragic car
accident. His only chance for survival is participation in an advanced medical experiment
called a ‘Type 2 transplant’ procedure. Jonas agrees.
It is the year 2020 and scientists are able to grow all parts of the human body, except for the
brain. A stock of bodies is kept cryogenically frozen to be used as spare parts in the event of
an emergency. In a ‘Type 2 transplant’ procedure, a team of doctors removes Jonas’ brain
and carefully places it in a stock body. Jonas’ original body is destroyed in the operation.
After the operation, all the right neural connections between the brain and the body have
been made. The doctors test all physiological responses and determine that the transplant
recipient is alive and functioning. The doctors scan the brain of the transplant recipient and
note that the memories [in it are the same as those that were in the brain before the operation
/ that were in the brain before the operation have disappeared. Something must have
happened during the transplant.]
Also, besides these two original conditions (memory and no-memory), we expanded the
study by designing two social conditions (memory and no-memory) and one moral condition (no-
memory). The social conditions were composed by putting extra social information about the main
character in the story. Specifically, social conditions differed from original conditions in two
respects. First, instead ‘Jonas agrees’ social conditions say: ‘Jonas discusses this issue with his wife
Joana, two already adult children Domas and Eglė, and a very good friend Benas. They all agree
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that Jonas should participate in the experiment.’ Second, the social conditions include additional
sentence at the end of the second paragraph: ‘After all the procedures Joana, Domas and Eglė help
the patient to recover.’ The moral condition was created by modifying the first paragraph of the
original no-memory condition in the following way:
Jonas is an accountant living in Vilnius. During past several months he has been stealing
large sums of money from the company’s account. After learning that the police are
conducting an investigation and that he is the main suspect he attempted to flee the country
by a car but was severely injured in a tragic car accident. His only chance for survival is
participation in an advanced medical experiment called a ‘Type 2 transplant’ procedure.
Jonas agrees to take part in the experiment after which he will have to stand before the
court. The company demands that all the pocketed money, part of which was already
splurged, must be returned.
We hypothesized that these social/moral conditions will elicit higher rates of attribution of
personhood and identity.
On the scale from 0 (totally disagree) to 9 (totally agree), participants then rated their
agreement with the following statements (the order of presentation was counterbalanced):
“After the event, the Type 2 transplant recipient is still Jonas.”
“After the event, the Type 2 transplant recipient is still the same person as before the
accident.”
“After the event, the Type 2 transplant recipient is still a person.”
“After the event, the Type 2 transplant recipient has the same memories as before the
procedure.” [Comprehension check question]
3.2. Results and Discussion
A 5 (condition) x 2 (gender) x 3 (statement) ANOVA with repeated measures on the statement
factor yielded a main effect of conditions, F(4, 233) = 17.594, p = 0.000, partial η² = 0.232. That is,
as expected there was an influence of memory loss on attributions of ‘still Jonas’ and ‘still the same
person’. Employing Bonferroni post-hoc test, differences were found between original (memory)
and original (no-memory), (p < 0.000), and social (memory) and social (no-memory) (p < 0.000),
but no difference was found between original (no-memory) and social or moral (no-memory)
conditions, which basically replicated the previous studies in the Lithuanian context (using words
asmuo and tas pats for ‘person’ and ‘the same’). Contrary to our prediction, social/moral conditions,
in this particular scenario, had no effect, although there was a trend in the predicted direction. There
was no main effect of gender, F(1, 233) = 3.629, p = 0.058, partial η² = 0.015 (although there was a
trend – males provided a bit higher ratings than females). Finally, results yielded a main effect of
the statement, F(2, 466) = 147.966, p = 0.000, partial η² = 0.388. It seems to be the case that the
destruction of memory was not a sufficient reason to treat the transplant recipient as a non-person
(response means were generally high in all three no-memory conditions, around 7 points). Blok et
al. (2001) also have observed this: “continuity of memory was not important for continuity of
personhood”. In general, the results suggest that continuity of memory is important in tracking an
individual, but it is not as important in categorizing post-transformation individual as a person.
Figure 2 depicts the original conditions for the differences between memory and no-
memory conditions: ‘still Jonas’ (t(94)=5,563; p=0,000); ‘still the same person’ (t(94)=7,016;
p=0,000); and ‘still a person’ (t(94)=2,728; p=0,008).
[Insert Figure 2 approximately here]
4. Persons in the Persistent Vegetative State
In the previous study we adopted prototypical scenarios of brain transplantation, what Nichols and
Bruno called the Lockean frame. This is a case where psychological continuity is ensured but bodily
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continuity is disrupted, and participants are asked to judge whether the resultant individual is ‘still
Jonas’ and ‘still a person’. Indeed, we replicated previous results: psychological continuity
(specifically, continuity of memory) is important for a post-transformation individual still to be
considered Jonas, although continuity of memory is not necessary for this individual to be
considered a person.
In the current study we aim to use scenarios that are more down-to-earth (non-science
fiction) and explicitly present a reverse case of radical psychological discontinuity and bodily
continuity. For this purpose we looked into the recent literature and were pleased to find several
interesting studies. In particular, Gray, Knickman, and Wegner (2001) devised a study that is
relevant to our purposes. They presented participants with scenarios where they had to evaluate the
mind of a person either in life, PVS (Persistent Vegetative State), or death, and “predicted that the
person in PVS would be seen to have fewer mental capacities than a dead person” (p. 276). This
was indeed the case. Moreover, participants consistently responded that a person in PVS has no
functioning psychology, which provides us with a good reason to use this particular scenario in our
studies. Thus, the adopted scenario was used to test the claim that psychological continuity is
considered necessary for people to treat the individual in PVS as identical to the pre-transformation
person.
4.1. Method
Participants were recruited from undergraduate courses at Vilnius University, some students also
participated in the previous studies, others were recruited for the first time. In total, there were N =
300 participants, but after checking for the comprehension of the task 52 participants were excluded
from the analysis (leaving N = 248, female 71 %, Mean age = 20). In this new study participants
were randomly allocated to one of the five conditions (that were different from the previous study)
with a roughly equal size.
In order to see whether psychological continuity is necessary for the judgments of
personhood and identity, we adopted a PVS scenario from the study by Gray, Knickman, and
Wegner (2011). In their original questionnaire there were six statements about various mental states
and one control question. Our aim is to explore folk judgments about persons and identity over
time, therefore we took the original PVS scenario (name and place were changed) and instead asked
to evaluate statements about identity and being a person (as in the Transplant scenarios). This way,
we managed to construct a stimulus that excludes psychological continuity and has similar
measurements that could be compared across studies.8
The adopted original version of the scenario was as follows (part in brackets is added to the
vignette taken from Gray, Knickman, and Wegner (2011) instead of ‘wake up again’):
Deivydas Petreikis grew up in Kaunas. He went to college in Vilnius and returned home to
Kaunas afterwards to work at his family’s local business. Shortly after he moved back home,
he went out to dinner with some friends from high school at a local restaurant. On his way
home from dinner, Deivydas’ car was struck head on by a truck that swerved across the
median. The ambulance arrived very quickly, but there was not much they could do for
Deivydas. Although Deivydas did not die, he entered a Persistent Vegetative State.
Deivydas’ entire brain was destroyed, except for the one part that keeps him breathing. So
while his body is still technically ‘alive’, he will never [regain consciousness. The life of the
patient will be supported by special equipment and hospital staff will take care of him].
This original version was contrasted with four other conditions that were designed to
manipulate social and moral variables. In the neutral condition all references to family and friends
were removed, this way minimizing the effect of social information. In particular, the neutral
vignette reads ‘small company’ instead of ‘his family’s local business’ and the phrase ‘with some
friends from high school’ is omitted. In the social condition, on the contrary, extra social cues were
included: a description of his family’s business (‘His father Rimas owns an electronic repairs shop
and his mother takes care of the shop’s accounting and orders’) and names of his friends and fiancé
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(instead of ‘some friends from high school’ the social vignette reads ‘his high school friends Tomas
and Rokas and his fiancé Marija’). Also, after the event, family takes care of the patient (instead of
‘hospital staff’ the vignette says ‘Rimas, Irena and Marija’).
There were two moral conditions. The help condition differs from the original vignette in
that instead of the sentence ‘On his way home from dinner, Deivydas’ car was struck head on by a
truck that swerved across the median.’ the following sentences were used: ‘On his way home
Deivydas noticed that two little children ran into the road. In order to save them Deivydas abruptly
turned off the road and hit the tree.’ Another difference from the original condition is that the last
sentence of the help vignette reads: ‘The life of the patient will be supported by special equipment
that was bought by the grateful parents of the saved children, and his family will take care of him.’
Harm condition included information about drunk driving and a car accident that killed two people:
‘Although he was already quite drunk, after the dinner Deivydas sat behind the wheel of his car. On
his way home he failed to control his car, swerved across the median while driving at high speed
and struck head on an oncoming car. Two people driving this car were killed on spot.’ Another
difference from the help condition was that the phrase ‘that was bought by the grateful parents of
the saved children’ was omitted. As in the previous study (Section 3), we hypothesized that
social/moral conditions will elicit higher rates of attribution of personhood and identity.
On the scale from 0 (totally disagree) to 9 (totally agree), participants then rated their
agreement with the following statements (the order of presentation was counterbalanced):
“After the event, the patient is still Deivydas.”
“After the event, the patient is still the same person as before.”
“After the event, the patient is still a person.”
“After the event, the patient will regain consciousness.” [Control question]
4.2. Results and Discussion
A 5 (condition) x 2 (gender) x 3 (statement) ANOVA with repeated measures on the statement
factor showed that there was an interaction between the statement, condition and gender, F(8, 454)
= 2.173, p = 0.028, partial η² = 0.037; and no interaction between statement and condition, F(8,
454) = 1.922, p = 0.055, partial η² = 0.033. There was no main effect of condition, F(2, 227) =
2,046, p = 0.089, partial η² = 0.035 (although there was a trend in a predicted direction, i.e., that
social/moral conditions will elicit higher ratings). However, there was a main effect of the
statement, F(2, 454) = 101.225, p = 0.000, partial η² = 0.308; and a main effect of gender, F(1, 227)
= 5.157, p = 0.024, partial η² = 0.022. Interestingly, female participants tended to attribute
individual identity and still hold this individual a person more often than male participants. As
figure 3 shows, there are indications (1) that judgments about identity (‘still Deivydas’) are
dissociated from judgments about being a person (more about this in Section 5), and (2) moral
conditions seem to have an effect on people’s judgments. Let’s look at responses to two statements
(‘still Deivydas’ and ‘still a person’) separately.
[Insert Figure 3 approximately here]
Specifically, looking at the descriptive statistics, it appears that across five conditions group
means do not differ substantially. That is, in all conditions, even if individual in PVS has no
functioning psychology, the individual is still Deivydas. A combined mean of responses was M =
6.69, a higher than chance response, t(236) = 10.576, p = 0.000. This indicates a systematic
intuition about sufficient conditions for identity ascriptions, at least in such situations as PVS. These
results support the hypothesis that psychological continuity is not necessary for preservation of
identity. It could be the case that the continuity of living body is sufficient for identity ascriptions
(with an assumption that proper names work well to track individual identity over
time/transformations). However, with such high ratings across different conditions, and with no
statistically significant differences between original/neutral and social/moral conditions, it is
difficult to tease apart the influence of bodily, social and moral cues. Thus, it is still an open
question to what extent people consider body as individually sufficient, perhaps some combination
19
of living bodily cues, social/moral cues and some other cues revealed in our free-listing study elicits
this effect.
The situation with the concept of person is a bit different. To a large extent, here responses
systematically vary along the predicted lines, namely neutral and original conditions < moral
(harm/help) conditions. More specifically, there were statistically significant differences between
neutral condition and both moral conditions (neutral vs. harm, t(91) = 2.551, p = 0.012; neutral vs.
help, t(90) = 2.454, p = 0.016). Whereas in the case of original vs. moral conditions the differences
were not statistically significant, but there was a trend in the predicted direction (original vs. harm
t(93) = 1.848, p = 0.068; original vs. help, t(92) = 1.760, p = 0.082). Social condition, however, did
not elicit higher ratings than neutral and original conditions. These findings are quite interesting:
unlike with the ‘still Deivydas’ statement, here it is possible, to some extent, to separate effects due
to bodily continuity (and possibly due to essential self, if people apply essentialist thinking as well)
and effects due to moral information. Again, the results suggest that psychological continuity is not
necessary for a PVS individual to be considered as a person. It appears that the continuity of the
living body in combination with past moral relations (and, perhaps, some other factors) is in general
sufficient for some ‘mindless’ human being to be considered as a person. Indeed, given that these
were two moral conditions, it could be argued that moral information had an effect on people’s
attributions of personhood. Furthermore, means of responses to original (M = 4.92, SD = 3.33) and
neutral (M = 4.38, SD = 3.51) conditions were close to the midpoint (4.5), indicating some
disagreement between participants. However, a sizable minority of participants explicitly judged
that individual in PVS is still Deivydas, but is not a person (more about this in Section 5).
Combined means of responses to moral conditions (harm M = 6.18, SD = 3.29; help M = 6.14, SD
= 3.36) were higher than chance response, t(89) = 4.729, p = 0.000.
Finally, it is interesting that in the PVS case past social relations had less of an influence
than moral relations. Nevertheless, we are intrigued about these results and predict that if folk draw
on several conceptual resources, then information that indicates social relations should be important
in some other cases, not necessarily in our PVS case.
5. Preserving identity while ceasing to be a person
It is common to find in the literature the usage of proper names as indicators of identity. For
example Rips, Blok, and Newman (2006) write:
We assume, along with Liittschwager (1995) and others, that proper names like Jim are rigid
designators that always refer to the same individual across situations or possible worlds; see
Kripke (1972). Participants who state that the transplant recipient is no longer Jim are,
therefore, affirming that the recipient is no longer the same individual (p. 7, note 5)
The same idea can be found in Rhemtulla (2005) or in Blok, Newman, Behr, and Rips (2001) and
Blok, Newman, and Rips (2005). Similarly, Nichols and Bruno (2010) adopt this strategy and ask
people whether the character in their vignette is ‘still Jim’ or ‘still Jerry’.
On the assumption that the use of proper name is a suitable indicator of identity over
transformations, our results show that people can judge identity to be preserved even if the post-
transformation individual is not judged to be a person. In the original and neutral conditions of the
PVS study there is a visible disassociation between ‘still Deivydas’ and ‘still a person’ judgments.
For example, in the neutral condition almost one third of the participants (14 out of 48)
simultaneously held the following two beliefs:
a) Not agreeing that the PVS patient is still a person (scale ratings 0-5), and
b) Thinking that the PVS patient is still Deivydas (scale ratings 6-9).
Eleven out of these participants straightforwardly denied that the patient is still a person (scale
ratings 0-3) while thinking it is still Deivydas (scale ratings 6-9). This finding is especially
pronounced in comparison of means: neutral (‘still Deivydas’ M = 6.42, SD = 3.49; ‘still a person’
M = 4.38, SD =3.51), original (‘still Deivydas’ M = 6.5, SD = 3.21; ‘still a person’ M = 4.92, SD
=3.33), and social (‘still Deivydas’ M = 6.48, SD = 3.23; ‘still a person’ M = 4.98. SD = 3.24).
21
Similar pattern holds in other PVS conditions as well (Figure 4). Thus, it seems possible to
preserve some kind of identity without preserving personhood.
[Insert Figure 4 approximately here]
These results are in line with findings by Blok, Newman, Behr, and Rips (2001): “we
document instances in which participants are more likely to assert individual continuity than
continuity of personhood”, and Blok, Newman, and Rips (2005): “The important condition is the
one in which the resulting creature has the body of a robot but the memories of Jim. In this case,
participants are more apt to agree that the creature is Jim than that the creature is a person”. See also
Liittschwager (1994) and Johnson (1990). However, our PVS scenario seems to be less artificial
than transformation scenarios employed in previous studies, such as uploading one’s mental
contents into a robotic body, magical transformation of persons into animals, or transplanting
human brain into a pig’s body. And, most importantly, instead of bodily discontinuity, PVS
scenarios had a psychological discontinuity.
In order to account for these results it would be helpful to distinguish between two types of
identity judgments. Let us call them personal identity and individual identity for the purposes of this
paper and formulate them into question form (cf. Shoemaker, 2008: 74):
Personal identity. If we have a person x at time t1 and a person y at time t2, when do x and y
count as the same person?
Individual identity. If we have an individual x at time t1 and an individual y at time t2, when
do x and y count as the same individual?9
Now, if the use of a proper name is considered to be a good indicator of identity judgments,
which of the two senses of identity is it an indicator of? The data suggests that it is more likely to be
individual identity, since proper name was used by our participants in circumstances where
personhood of post-transformational individual was denied, that is, where post-transformational
individual was not considered to be a person. In other words, this suggests that everyday judgments
about an individual’s identity do not depend on the individual’s membership in the category person
(see also Blok, Newman, & Rips, 2005; Liittschwager, 1994; Johnson, 1990). This methodological
point has some bearing on the interpretation of previous studies that relied on attributions of proper
names as indicators of personal identity. The notion of personal identity requires both pre-
transformational individual and post-transformational individual to be persons (that is, to fit some
criterion of personhood) and the two persons have to be identical as persons (that is, to fit some
criterion of personal identity). Since the data suggest that people can continue to use proper names
even when they deny personhood to post-transformational individuals, we believe that at least in
these situations they use a much thinner notion of identity than personal identity, namely, individual
identity. By our definition, individual identity requires the fulfillment of neither of the two criteria.
Thus, if these considerations are correct, then a cautionary note is in order: we should be more
careful in attributing philosophers’ thick notion of personal identity to people’s use of proper names
in identity judgments.
If we combine these results (that folk can ascribe identity without ascribing personhood)
with results from Section 3 (that personhood can be ascribed even where preservation of identity is
denied, as judged from the use of proper names in no-memory cases), then we get a double
disassociation between the concept of person and the concept of individual identity. Thus, if there is
a reason to doubt that the folk use the unitary notion of personal identity while discussing
hypothetical cases, then there is a reason to doubt the relevance of Nichols and Bruno’s claim (1). In
particular, if folk do not rely on anything that would resemble the philosopher’s notion of personal
identity, then there seems to be little reason to accept the antecedent of the implication: “[i]t is
appropriate to rely on folk intuitions in assessing theories of personal identity” (2010, p. 306).10
6. Disambiguating Qualitative and Numerical Identity
Derek Parfit, in his 1984 book ‘Reasons and Persons’ writes:
23
There are two kinds of sameness, or identity. I and my Replica are qualitatively identical, or
exactly alike. But we may not be numerically identical, or one and the same person.
Similarly, two white billiard balls are not numerically but may be qualitatively identical. If I
paint one of these balls red, it will cease to be qualitatively identical with itself as it was. But
the red ball that I later see and the white ball that I painted red are numerically identical.
They are one and the same ball (p. 201).
It is numerical identity that is relevant for philosophers when they talk about personal identity over
time. Likewise, psychologists investigating the concept of identity assume numerical identity as
well. For example, Rips, Blok, and Newman state: “When we refer to objects being identical in
what follows, it is to this relation of numerical identity or equality and not to the relation of looking
alike or sharing many qualitative properties (as in identical twins)” (2006, p. 2).
In the English language ‘the same’ can be used to express any of the two senses of identity
and it is usually the context that disambiguates the two. In Lithuanian language, however, there is a
convenient pair of phrases that are used to disambiguate between numerical identity and qualitative
identity. This pair is tas pats and toks pats. When used independently, tas pats can be ambiguous
between these two senses of identity, and it is usually disambiguated by the context. But when
contrasted with toks pats, tas pats means ‘the same’ in the sense of numerical identity while toks
pats means ‘the same’ in the sense of qualitative identity.11
We conducted a study to disambiguate
between these two senses of identity.12
6.1 Method
We took three vignettes from the previous studies. Original transplantation with memory, original
transplantation without memory and original PVS (N=40; N=57; and N=40, respectively), and
added to them an explanation of the two notions of identity based on the earlier quote from Parfit,
and two claims (in random order) with a request to rate those claims on a scale from 0 (totally
disagree) to 9 (totally agree). Thus, to each of the three vignettes about a character undergoing
transplantation or being in PVS, we added the following description. Tas pats (the same in the
numerical sense) and toks pats (the same in the qualitative sense) are left in Lithuanian and in
singular (all presented descriptions were in Lithuanian):
Now we would like to draw your attention to the fact that there are two ways to speak about
‘identity’. This difference is best expressed in Lithuanian language by using phrases tas pats
and toks pats. If we have two white billiard balls, we can say that they are toks pats, but they
are not tas pats billiard ball. If we paint one of the balls red, it is not toks pats billiard ball as
before, but it is still tas pats, only painted.
Keeping in mind these two senses - tas pats and toks pats - rate the following statements:
“After the event, the patient [Type 2 transplant recipient] is still tas pats person as before the
event.”
“After the event, the patient [Type 2 transplant recipient] is still toks pats person as before
the event.”
Results were compared to the results of original vignettes from the previous studies, which
did not include the disambiguation between numerical and qualitative identity.
6.2. Results and Discussion
As expected, disambiguation between the numerical and the qualitative readings of ‘the same’
influenced the attribution of ‘still the same person’. In the first transplant study (Section 3) we
observed a sharp decline of attributions of ‘still the same person’ when continuity of memory was
disrupted. In comparison to this earlier study, disambiguated ratings of the numerical identity (tas
pats) were similar in the memory condition and sharply increased in the no-memory condition. In
transplantation with memory: toks pats, M = 3.98 (SD = 3.34); tas pats, M = 5.22 (SD = 3.37) (non-
disambiguated vignette M = 5.96, SD = 2.99); and without memory: toks pats, M = 2.42 (SD =
25
3.13); tas pats, M = 4.63 (SD = 3.5) (non-disambiguated vignette M = 2.22, SD = 2.21). A sharp
increase was also observed in the PVS scenario: toks pats, M = 2.39 (SD = 2.39); tas pats, M = 6.39
(SD = 3.01) (non-disambiguated original PVS vignette: M = 3.36, SD = 3.21). Recall, that in the
original, not disambiguated, version of the transplantation study (see section 3) people rated ‘still
the same person’ comparatively lower than ‘still Jonas’ and especially so in the no-memory
condition. Why such results in the previous transplantation scenarios? Perhaps qualitative reading
of ‘the same’ played a major role in the no-memory condition: indeed, someone with lost memories
seems different in a very important sense. However, in this study an explicit disassociation of
qualitative properties from ‘the same’ allowed participants to apply a much thinner notion of
numerical identity in the no-memory context. Therefore, the mean response was significantly higher
than in the original version. That is, in the original no-memory condition people might have read
the statement ‘is still the same person’ qualitatively and responded to it by applying this principle:
‘if he lost memories [qualitative properties], then in a very important [qualitative] sense he seems to
be not the same person as before’ (Figure 5). The same explanation can be offered for sharp
increase of ‘the same person’ attributions in the disambiguated PVS vignette.
[Insert Figure 5 approximately here]
Of course, we think that more research is needed to understand whether this explicit
dissociation between the two senses of identity was indeed responsible for the drastic reduction of
identity ascriptions in the original no-memory condition. However, these results suggest that we
should pay more attention to the differences between numerical and qualitative identity in folk
judgments in order to tease apart the effect of memory loss on ascriptions of numerical identity and
qualitative identity. Indeed, retention of memory may not be so critical to the preservation of
individual numerical identity after all.
7. Philosophical and Methodological Implications.
If our empirical and conceptual considerations are correct, then our research has
implications for the argument produced by Nichols and Bruno. Specifically, our empirical and
conceptual considerations challenge the premise (2) of their argument: “Folk intuitions favoring a
psychological approach to personal identity are especially robust.” We also raise some doubts
concerning the relevance of the antecedent of premise (1), consequently, casting some doubts
concerning the antecedent of conclusion (3), namely, that “It is appropriate to rely on folk intuitions
in assessing theories of personal identity”
Our results show that psychological properties are an important but not a necessary
component in ascribing personhood and that psychological continuity is important but not necessary
in tracking identity of an individual over time or transformations. Furthermore, we suggest that
there is no such thing as a unitary folk concept of personal identity – there are two interacting
concepts of person and of identity of an individual. Now, let us recapitulate these and other points
that emerged in our studies.
First, there are two important conceptual points here. One of the findings (Section 5) was
that the concept of personal identity, as used by philosophers, is probably not used by the folk in
discussing the hypothetical cases. The fact that the folk can track identity (as judged either from
their use of proper names or, as in Section 6, the phrase ‘the same person [in the numerical sense]’)
even when they decline to treat the post-transformational individual as a person, suggests that
people do not use a unitary concept of personal identity but rather rely on two separate concepts: a
person and identity of an individual. There seems to be a double disassociation between these
concepts, as described in Section 5. The other point was that the notion of identity should be clearly
disambiguated between qualitative and numerical identity and, consequently, qualitative and
numerical readings of the phrase ‘the same person’ should be carefully distinguished (Section 6).
Second, we outlined the content of the very concept of a person (asmuo), as it is conceived
by Lithuanian participants. These free-listing data revealed a quite complex structure indicating rich
conceptual resources (we tentatively identified six different dimensions, see Section 2) that people
27
apply while thinking about persons. So, when the folk think about issues that philosophers would
analyze in terms of personal identity, they use a wide variety of conceptual resources. This way, rich
conceptual resources of the concept person can play a direct role in deciding whether pre- and post-
transformational individuals are persons, but it is less clear whether these conceptual resources play
any direct role in deciding whether these two persons are numerically identical to one another as
persons. That said, while psychological properties seem to be the most important components of
folk concept of person, still, they comprise only one of the six conceptual clusters that one can rely
on in various social situations.
Third, we have directly tested the necessity of psychological continuity in ascriptions of
identity (as measured by the use of proper names) in a reverse version of the Lockean frame (our
PVS scenario, Section 4), where psychological continuity is disrupted and bodily continuity is
preserved. The results showed that psychological continuity is indeed not considered by the folk to
be necessary for preservation of identity13
and that the continuity of body in combination with
relevant social/moral information is sufficient for identity ascriptions (assuming that proper names
are good designators of identity). And it appears that the continuity of the living body in
combination with relevant moral information is sufficient for some ‘mindless’ human to be
considered as a person. Thus, the results indicate that people can draw on several conceptual
resources when thinking about personhood and about identity of individuals, not only on intuitions
about psychological properties and psychological continuity. Furthermore, it should be emphasized
that in our PVS study a sizable portion of participants in the neutral and original conditions ascribed
identity (‘still Deivydas’) more often and to a higher degree than they ascribed personhood (‘still a
person’). It indicates a much thinner notion of identity, what we called individual identity, than a
traditional thick notion of personal identity. At this point we can only speculate how a concept of
individual identity and a concept of person interact. One possible model (Figure 6) could be
composed of two parts: first, people decide whether a pre-transformational individual is a person by
applying conceptual resources revealed in our free-listing study. Second, they track this individual
through time and transformations using a thinner kind of individual identity that does not require
post-transformation individual to remain a person (even in cases of radical transformation: from
human to robot, to animal or to artifact; see Blok, Newman, & Rips, 2005; Liittschwager, 1994; and
Johnson, 1990). However, it seems that the concept of identity of an individual is not fully devoid
of qualitative characteristics, since attribution of proper name appears to be sensitive to the
disruption of psychological continuity (Section 3) and to moral considerations (Section 4).14
We are
not in a position to fully characterize the folk concept of individual (as used in proper name
attributions in our hypothetical cases) but it is quite clear that it is not identical to the folk concept
of person.14
[Insert Figure 6 approximately here]
Fourth, things could be further complicated. It is quite possible that the effect of
psychological discontinuity on identity attribution can be reduced by carefully disambiguating
numerical and qualitative senses of identity. This objection, coming out of our results from the
disambiguation study (Section 6), is especially applicable to the Abstract frame since Nichols and
Bruno asked participants an abstract question about personal identity that does not rely on the use of
proper names but rather asks to evaluate what is needed for a person to be the same person over
time:
One problem that philosophers wonder about is what makes a person the same person from
one time to another. For instance, what is required for some person in the future to be the
same person as you? What do you think is required for that? (2010, p. 304)
Nichols and Bruno reported that “over 70% of the participants explicitly mentioned psychological
factors like memory or personality traits as necessary for persistence” (ibid.). There is a real
possibility, however, that, just like in our study disambiguating the numerical and the qualitative
senses of ‘the same’, the expression ‘the same person’ was read by participants in a qualitative
sense. Specifically, participants could think that ‘of course, to be the same person [under qualitative
reading], one should have characteristic psychological properties’. We predict, therefore, that the
29
disambiguated Abstract frame would provide quite different results, where the importance of
psychological continuity for attributions of numerical identity might be reduced. Indeed, the same
argument is applicable to the study on Reflexive equilibrium.
To provide a synopsis of the main points made in this article, let us group them in three
groups: negative claims, positive claims and methodological implications. The negative points are:
first, it seems not to be the case that folk intuitions about hypothetical cases strongly favor
psychological approach to identity preservation – in fact, psychological continuity is not thought to
be necessary for identity preservation (Section 4); second, it seems not to be the case that in
thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations the folk rely on anything like philosopher’s
notion of personal identity – in other words, that identity judgments in hypothetical cases do not
track identity conditions supplied by a concept ‘person’ and that there is a double disassociation
between identity and personhood judgments (Section 5). The positive points are: first, the folk
seems to rely on a diverse set of conceptual resources while thinking about persons, as revealed by
the free-listing study (Section 2); second, that in tracking the identity of an individual the folk can
employ a wide variety of cues including information on moral reactive attitudes, psychological and
bodily continuity. However, currently available data do not put us in a position to specify the
relevant folk notion of an individual in more detail. Methodological points include: first (Section 5),
a suggestion that the use of proper names is not a reliable indicator of judgments of personal
identity (as opposed to individual identity) and, second (Section 6), an observation that the failure to
disambiguate between different senses of identity can make it difficult to interpret the data. Finally,
we believe that all this gives us a good reason to be skeptical about prospects of using folk
intuitions in fueling philosophical theorizing about personal identity. Nichols and Bruno noted that
“academic philosophers did not invent [the problem of personal identity] – its seeds are within us”
(2010, p. 294). We inspected the seeds and it seems that they can grow into conceptual trees of
personal identity only after much philosophical pruning.
Notes
1 Eric T. Olson (2010, Ch. 3), himself a proponent of the bodily view, acknowledges this fact in a
recent overview of the problem: “most philosophers writing on personal identity since the early
20th century have endorsed some version of the Psychological Approach”.
2 When we speak about ‘hypothetical cases’ throughout the article we mean cases of
transformations from literature on personal identity, including those employed in experiments of
this paper. Since our task is to explore what is it that is thought to preserve or lose identity through
transformations, we wish to avoid formulations that presuppose some concept to be central to such
stories (e.g. ‘person’, ‘human being’, ‘biological entity’ or ‘physical object’).
3 These hypothetical cases, allegedly eliciting anti-psychologist intuitions [Pain frame], describe a
person (either Jerry or you) who loses all distinctive mental states (including memories) during a
medical procedure and later is administered a series of painful shots. Then the subjects are asked
whether they agree with the claim “When the doctors administer the series of shots, Jerry [you] will
feel the pain.” Since subjects tended to agree with this claim, Nichols and Bruno concluded that
these cases elicit anti-psychological intuitions. However, in the light of other results, they
downplayed this result and concluded that intuitions favoring the psychological view are especially
robust.
4 It is important to note the difference between the claim that (a) psychological continuity is
considered necessary for preservation of identity over time and transformations and two other
claims about personhood: that (b) psychological continuity is considered necessary for ascriptions
of personhood to post-transformation individuals (diachronic perspective) and that (c) having a
functioning psychology is considered necessary for ascription of personhood to individuals
(synchronic perspective). All three claims will be discussed in the course of this paper and we make
efforts to be clear which of the claims is being discussed.
31
5 Consequently, we cast some doubt on treating the use of proper names as a reliable indicator of
judgments of personal identity.
6 See (Borgatti, 1996).
7 Some authors have argued that this
philosophers’ emphasis on psychological factors echoes
general cultural tendency in the West. For example, Carl Nils Johnson (1990, p. 971) states: “While
all cultures distinguish inner aspects of self, Western cultures are known to particularly emphasize
the private, enduring psychological qualities of identity.”
8 If one is after testing the necessity claim, PVS is a much better example than cases of partial
psychological discontinuity, since it provides a case of radical psychological discontinuity, which
contrasts with such cases as amnesia, in which patients lose their memory but still retain some
psychological functioning – they are conscious, can form beliefs and have desires.
9 These two senses are potentially conflated in the explication of the problem of personal identity
provided by Nichols & Bruno (2010, p. 293): “When is someone the same person across space and
time? That is, when do two individuals at different places on different occasions count as
quantitatively identical?” (italics our).
10 An anonymous referee suggested to us that disassociation of person and individual identity may
be less plausible in first person scenarios that use personal pronouns than in third person scenarios
that use proper names. In fact, Nichols and Bruno (2010, p. 304; 306), in two of their studies, ask
whether retention of at least some of your memories is needed in order for some person in the future
to be you. Our argument in Section 5 does not extend to first person cases, since additional research
is needed to establish whether the personal pronoun ‘I’, when used by the folk in their thinking
about hypothetical cases, is necessarily connected to the concept person.
11 The same conceptual distinctions can be found in some other Indo-European languages, such as
Russian (‘то же’ and ‘такое же’).
12 One potential limitation of this study is that availability of conceptual distinctions, such as
between tas pats and toks pats, may result in differences in conceptions of key notions addressed in
this paper between languages that have the capacity to express such distinctions and those that have
this capacity to a lesser degree or not at all. This constitutes potential threat to generalizability of
present research and calls for more cross-linguistic studies.
13 It can be mentioned here that studies on Pain frame, as indicated in note 2, can also be seen as
conflicting with the psychological view and premise (2).
14 A good example of a proper name use to track a particularly thin identity is provided by
Liittschwager (1994, p. 83). In some circumstances it doesn't sound weird to people to hear that
uncle Ralph is in the urn if the urn contains his cremated remains.
15 To use the terms used in debates on sortalism and anti-sortalism about object individuation and
identity preservation (for an overview see Xu 2007), we join Blok, Newman, & Rips (2005; 2007)
in denying that folk think about hypothetical cases of transformations in terms of identity conditions
supplied by the sortal concept ‘person’.
Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and
suggestions. This research was funded by a grant (No. PRO-08/2012) from the Research Council of
Lithuania.
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Tables & Figures
Table 1: Terms used 5 times or more often in the free-listing task. Average rank of a term indicates
the average position of that term on the lists of the subjects who mentioned the term.
37
Figure 1: Reconstructed structure of a concept person. Most frequently used (5 times or more)
terms were grouped into six conceptual clusters.
Figure 2. Mean ratings for influence of memory on attributions. Error bars show standard errors.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Jonas The sameperson
Person
Memory retained Memory lost
39
Figure. 3. Mean ratings for influence of social and moral cues on attributions of proper name and
personhood. Error bars show standard errors.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Still Deivydas Still a person
Neutral Original Social
Help Harm
Figure 4. Mean ratings for attribution of proper names and personhood. Error bars show standard
errors.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Still Deivydas Still a person
41
Figure 5. Mean ratings for influence of memory on attributions of ‘the same person’.
Disambiguated ratings were derived when subjects were alerted to the distinction between
numerical and qualitative identity. Error bars show standard errors.
0
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
Original Disambiguated
Memory retained
Memory lost
Figure 6. A model of interaction between folk concepts of person and identity. PVS story (Section
4) provides an example of a situation where an earlier individual A is considered to be a person and
a later individual B is considered to be a person to a much smaller degree. The brain transplantation
scenario (Section 3) presents a case where both an earlier individual A and a later individual B are
considered persons. A situation opposite to the PVS scenario would be, presumably, maturity of
embryo A (less likely to be considered a person) into a child B (more likely to be considered a
person).