A dialogue on personaL identity

It is Monday and a new week always brings Lottie (a teenager axolotl) that same balance of optimism about possibilities and pessimism that she faces a whole week of morning long tutorials with her sometimes ferocious tutor Hipparchus. For once, however, she has not lingered over breakfast and is almost on time. Perhaps to get it over with.

“Good morning” says her tutor cheerfully. “Today we’re going to have a philosophy tutorial. Stop that groan right now! We’re going to discuss personal identity. And to start with, we can think of this as expressed in the question: what makes you, now, the same person as you were yesterday or last year? Or, a more concrete example. We all heard someone making an awful fuss about stubbing their toe in the showers this morning. Are you the person who made that racket? Is it you who was, and thus still is, responsible? 

“We can call this a question of reidentification. It is not the only question, but it will do to start.”

“But I don’t think I am the same as I was last year. I’ve changed in all sorts of ways.” - Lottie - “My football skills have improved. I can dribble and then strike the ball into the back of the net. Every time! Almost. Also I know a bit of philosophy, too, not that that’s any good.”

“Yes. That is one use of ‘the same’. A person can change over time and thus be not quite the same. But note that I just said that a person can change. To say that presupposes some sameness: it is one and the same person who changes. So what makes for the same person?

“Let us start with a simpler example. George Washington famously cut down an apple tree with an axe. Let us assume that this axe has been preserved to this day but in its long life has required several new handles and several new blades. Is the current axe the same axe? Is it Washington’s axe?”

“Well it is and it isn’t! It’s made of different parts. So it’s not the same. It’s not identical. But I suppose if the parts were changed gradually and if, to make it a better example, there were lots of pieces to be slowly replaced…”

“More like the Ship of Theseus whose many wooden planks were slowly replaced over time…”

“Yes. Then I suppose we might say it is or was the same overall axe or ship. It doesn’t really matter. We can say what we like.”

“That is a common response to this question” said Hipparchus. “In the case of artefacts like this it does seem that we just need to establish some convention and that is as deep as the answer can go. It seems natural to think of artefacts like the axe and the ship as functional kinds. They remain the same entity in part (though only in part as their continuous career through time and space matters) because they retain a specific function even though their material has changed. But people tend to be quite relaxed about this. 

“Note that we have already skated over an ambiguity. When you said that the new axe was not identical to the original axe and when you said that, all the same, it might be the very same axe, you suggested at first that the new axe isn’t qualitatively identical to the old - by not having the very same qualities or properties or even component parts - but that it might be quantitatively identical. It might be the very same one. 

“But now, what of you? You eat and, I’m afraid to say, defecate; you shed old skin and grow new skin. If I’m not mistaken, you have grown slightly bigger over a year. Are you the same Lottie, the very same creature?”

“Well I am. I may not be qualitatively identical to how I was. I mean: I’m different in lots of little ways. My body is different. I have different thoughts. I can do things I couldn’t do. But I’m still Lottie.”

“And when you say that, do you mean that we may as well call you that. We may as well speak this way. That’s the convention we use?”

“No! I really am the same person!”

“But if your body is different, what makes you you? And why does this seem a much more black and white fact than Washington’s axe?”

“No idea, Teach!”

A little history

Hipparchus sighs and then reaches down two books from his selves and flicks got the right pages.

“This is what John Locke says.”

11. Personal Identity. This being premised, to find wherein personal identity consists, we must consider what PERSON stands for;—which, I think, is a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consideritself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it: it being impossible for any one to perceive without PERCEIVING that he does perceive. When we see, hear, smell, taste, feel, meditate, or will anything, we know that we do so. Thus it is always as to our present sensations and perceptions: and by this every one is to himself that which he calls SELF:—it not being considered, in this case, whether the same self be continued in the same or divers substances. For, since consciousness always accompanies thinking, and it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self, and thereby distinguishes himself from all other thinking things, in this alone consists personal identity, i.e. the sameness of a rational being: and as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, so far reaches the identity of that person; it is the same self now it was then; and it is by the same self with this present one that now reflects on it, that that action was done. (Locke 1975: II.xxvii.11)

Person, as I take it, is the name for this self. Where-ever a Man finds, what he calls himself, there I think another may say is the same Person. It is a Forensick Term appropriating Actions and their Merit; and so belongs only to intelligent Agents capable of a Law, and Happiness and Misery. (Locke 1975: II.xxvii.28)

“Ah” - Lottie - “So that’s a difference between personal identity and axes. We have mental lives! Bodies are secondary! It’s souls that matter!”

“And that seems to be Locke’s idea. He considers what now seems a familiar notion of science fiction or gothic horror. The soul of a prince could be placed in the body of a cobbler and if so the continuous identity of the prince would follow the prince’s soul, not his body, even if this would cause epistemic difficulties for others. To avoid religious baggage we can say that the prince’s ‘self’ is transferred.

17. The body, as well as the soul, goes to the making of a Man. And thus may we be able, without any difficulty, to conceive the same person at the resurrection, though in a body not exactly in make or parts the same which he had here,—the same consciousness going along with the soul that inhabits it. But yet the soul alone, in the change of bodies, would scarce to any one but to him that makes the soul the man, be enough to make the same man. For should the soul of a prince, carryingwith it the consciousness of the prince's past life, enter and inform the body of a cobbler, as soon as deserted by his own soul, every one sees he would be the same PERSON with the prince, accountable only for the prince's actions… (Locke 1975: II.xxvii.17)”

“Good. So that’s sorted. That was a really good quick lesson. Thanks. I’m off now!”

“Not so fast. Here’s what David Hume, whose life didn’t quite overlap with Locke, wrote.

For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.... If anyone, upon serious and unprejudiced reflection, thinks he has a differentnotion of himself, I must confess I can reason no longer with him. All I can allow him is, that he may be in the right as well as I, and that we are essentially different in this particular. He may, perhaps, perceive something simple and continued, which he calls himself; though I am certain there is no such principle in me. (Hume 1978: 252)”

“Oh. I see. So looking into his mind, he can find his mental marbles but not the bag that holds them all together?”

“A surprisingly poetic idea, Lottie! But yes: if there is some ‘principle’ that gathers together someone’s ideas, it is that principle that looks to be a good basis for what makes a person the same person over time or what comprises their self. Yet Hume implies that this could never be experienced. And being an empiricist, this was a particular problem for him. Without an experience to correlate with a concept then the concept itself is threatened. We do not need that restriction, but even so, what could be the self that constitutes Lockean identity over time, given bodily changes?

“Hume himself adopted a kind of bundle theory. The self just is a collection of mental elements but not what binds them together.”

“I’m just spit-balling here” - Hipparchus winces - “but Hume just wouldn’t come across my thoughts would he? He’d only ever come across his. Might that be enough? Imagine that I’ve got some marbles and you’ve got some marbles. One possible ‘bundle’ of marbles might be half of mine and half of yours. Or all the blue ones. But my marbles are mine and yours are yours. So a bundle theory doesn’t seem enough. But might what it is missing - that mine are mine, yours are yours, but I only ever experience mine - be enough? I couldn’t experience your thoughts”

“And what if, per impossibile, you did?”

“Er. Well then they’d be mine after all!”

“That is not a silly idea. Let me leave it for the moment and tell you about Daniel Dennett because he is one of the main proponents of a family of responses to Hume and Locke.”

Dennett

Hipparchus outlines the main themes of one of Dennett’s papers which argues that selves are abstract objects akin to centres of gravity, and that serve particular purposes but whose equivalent ‘theory’ takes the form of a narrative not mechanics.

“Daniel Dennett is a philosopher who defends the idea that persons are self-creating. He claims that a self is a ‘centre of narrative gravity’. To outline his view, he suggests an analogy with the physical notion of a centre of gravity.

A centre of gravity is just an abstractum. It’s just a fictional object. But when I say it’s a fictional object, I do not mean to disparage it; it’s a wonderful fictional object, and it has a perfectly legitimate place within serious, sober, echt physical science. (Dennett 1992: 104)

“The idea of a centre of gravity is deployed within a branch of physics to describe and predict the behaviour of physical systems acting under physical forces. What a centre of gravity is depends on this theoretical context and it is one of the useful tools and ideas that go to make that context. The concept is one amongst others interdependent on a theoretical stance.

“Selves are given similar treatment. Like centres of gravity or mental states, they are theoretical, even fictional, entities articulated within an interpretative theoretical stance.

A self is also an abstract object, a theorist’s fiction. The theory is not particle physics but what we might call a branch of people-physics; it is more soberly known as a phenomenology or hermeneutics, or soul-science (Geisteswissenschaft). The physicist does an interpretation, if you like, of the chair and its behaviour, and comes up with the theoretical abstraction of a centre of gravity, which is then very useful in characterising the behaviour of the chair in the future, under a wide variety of conditions. The hermeneuticist or phenomenologist--or anthropologist--sees some rather more complicated things moving about in the world--human beings and animals--and isfaced with a similar problem of interpretation. It turns out to be theoretically perspicuous to organise the interpretation around a central abstraction: each person has a self (in addition to a centre of gravity). In fact we have to posit selves for ourselves as well. The theoretical problem of self-interpretation is at least as difficult and important as the problem of other-interpretation. (ibid: 104)”

“In saying this, what’s he really trying to do? What’s it about?” Lottie finally interjects.

“I think that it is useful to consider the perceived alternative to it that Dennett rejects. He gives a clear statement of this in the following passage which starts with a brisk re-iteration of the advantages of his narrative account for describing some forms of psychopathology such as multiple personality disorder but also mentions the alternative to which it stands opposed.

We sometimes encounter psychological disorders, or surgically created disunities, where the only way to interpret or make sense of them is to posit in effect two centers of gravity, two selves. One isn’t creating or discovering a little bit of ghost stuff in doing that. One is simply creating another abstraction. It is an abstraction one uses as part of a theoretical apparatus to understand, and predict, and make sense of, the behavior of some very complicated things. The fact that these abstract selves seem so robust and real is not surprising. They are much more complicated theoretical entities than a center of gravity. And remember that even a center of gravity has a fairly robust presence, once we start playing around with it. But no one has ever seen or ever will see a center of gravity. As David Hume noted, no one has ever seen a self, either. (ibid: 114)”

Lottie says: “I remember you talked about abstracta and illata before, when discussed concepts as aspects of thought. So Dennett thinks that selves are abstractions. They are not things to be found at all. One couldn’t directly experience one. But they are made up, like Hume’s bundles, by gathering events and thoughts and suchlike into some sort of story? In my example of your marbles and my marbles, the right bundles are the ones that fit into stories, one of which corresponds to you and one to me? But - hold on! - who is telling these stories? Hasn’t he just helped himself to the idea of a self who tells its own story?”

“A good thought. The point of Dennett’s example of the robot which narrates its behaviour is that whatever plays the role of the teller need not amount to a self. But that just was an analogy. In our case, it raises the question of what would be the equivalent of the robot. And it seems hard to avoid the idea that the notion of a story - if it is to play any kind of elucidating role - will require an author and then it seems odd if that author isn’t us. But we are also supposed to be the story itself. 

“Given that in his book on consciousness, Dennett rejects the idea that there is a place in the brain where all experience ‘comes together’ calling this the ‘Cartesian Theatre’, he might be happy to say that subsidiary and mindless bits of the brain do this work, a bit like the robot. But then it is hard to know what the connection is between what they produce and any actual story, told in words. 

“In fact, fans of this approach often seem quite lax in talking both of selves as stories and of rational subjects as authoring their stories. 

“I have a couple of other qualms. One concerns the materials for the story itself. It seems to me that these will often have to presuppose a notion of self in giving an account of one main topics of the story: that the subject of the story - the self - has or experiences various mental phenomena. Unlike tables and chairs, mental phenomena essentially have subjects - us! - so how could a story be told of the having of neutral subject-less experiences which subsequently constructs us? What are these subject-less experiences? Pains which occur generally and to no person? They don’t seem to be experiences like ours. But if the stories concern familiar experiences then they will presuppose the very thing the account was supposed to explain. Pains, say, as being experienced by someone, as pains are.”

“So is there nothing in this story idea then?”

“Well note that Dennett was trying to solve a problem that Hume generated and which - from our perspective at least - seems a response to Locke’s idea that personal identity has to do with mental continuity. That’s why he says that selves just are narratives. But we might think that narratives are important even if we do not advance that striking claim.”

“Such as?”

“Well such as:


• That selves can, of necessity, construct narratives. 
• That selves experience themselves in narrative form. That is, that a sense of self is of a narratively structured form of existence. 
• That lives are essentially narratively structured. 
• Or that some longer term aspects of lives, ant least, are essentially narratively structured. 
• That the construction of a narrative, while not conceptually necessary to be a self, is a contingent necessity for flourishing. 
• That the proper aim of psychotherapy is the construction of a narrative.” 

“OK but what of our problem?! What makes me me over time if it isn’t Locke’s idea because of Hume’s point nor Dennett’s stories?”

“Good! Yes, we need to keep track of our problems. We don’t have long today so I am going to suggest why our sort of life, the life of a rational subject, has to be at least partially narrative in form. This has to do with the idea that rational subjects think and act under conceptions of rationality. That is just what it means to be a rational subject. I will then suggest why that connects to both flourishing and the aims of psychotherapy. And then, like a magician producing a ferret from their trousers, I’ll try to address your problem with a gnomic flourish. But you won’t like it. Come back quickly after the coffee break.” 

Alisdair MacIntyre

“An influential narrative theorist of this sort is Alisdair MacIntyre. One of his arguments stems from the iterative nature of reason explanation. Suppose I ask you what you were doing yesterday afternoon?”

“I was playing football.”

“And why were you playing football?”

“I was practicising.”

“Why?”

“Because I want to be a professional footballer.”

“I assume you also believe that by practising you at least raise the chances of becoming one? Equally, you might have answered my question by saying that you believe that by practising you might become a professional footballer and I could also have filled in the gap that this is something you want. Note the typical pairing of belief and desire that so often go to make an action explanation. Sometimes we cite beliefs and desires, sometimes just one or the other. Sometimes we cite a larger action (not a mental state) such as ‘I was practising to become a professional footballer.’ Indeed it has been argued that the most basic form of action explanation is: I was doing X because I was doing Y.)

“Anyway: and why do you want to be a footballer.”

“I don’t know. The money. The fame. But also, I just really like playing football.”

“See how a simple question about yesterday afternoon quickly sheds light on one major potential life project and, if I may add, your conception of what a worthwhile life for you might be, or at least include. Well, that is MacIntryre’s key idea. It is a feature of the self-conscious life of a rational subject that explanations for what they/we do escalate into, or perhaps presuppose, a broader narrative. Let me read some quotes.”

It is a conceptual commonplace, both for philosophers and for ordinary agents, that one and the same segment of human behavior may be correctly characterized in a number of different ways. To the question ‘What is he doing?’ the answers may with equal truth and appropriateness be ‘Digging’, ‘Gardening’, ‘Taking exercise’, ‘Preparing for winter’ or ‘Pleasing hiswife’. Some of these answers will characterize the agent’s intentions, other unintended consequences of his actions, and of these unintended consequences some may be such that the agent is aware of them and others not. What is important to notice immediately is that any answer to the questions of how we are to understand or to explain a given segment of behavior will presuppose some prior answer to the question of how these different correct answers to the question ‘What is he doing?’ are related to each other. (MacIntryre 1981: 206)

What the narrative concept of selfhood requires is thus twofold. On the one hand, I am what I may justifiably be taken by others to be in the course of living out a story that runs from my birth to my death; I am the subject of a history that is my own and no one else’s, that has its own peculiar meaning. I am not only accountable, I am one who can always ask others for an account, who can put others to the question. I am part of their story, as they are part of mine. The narrative of any onelife is part of an interlocking set of narratives… To be the subject of a narrative that runs from one’s birth to one’s death is, I remarked earlier, to be accountable for the actions and experiences which compose a narratable life. (MacIntryre 1981: 217)

“But this is also a modest account.

I am not arguing that the concepts of narrative or of intelligibility or of accountability are more fundamental than that of personal identity. Theconcepts of narrative, intelligibility and accountability presuppose the applicability of the concept of personal identity... (MacIntryre 1981: 218)

“So” suggests Lottie “he is not really playing the same ball game as Dennett, is he? It is as though, for him, the narrative bit is only part of the story. It gets added to some other story that you’ve not told me yet about what a self is. But if so, aren’t we back where we started. Hume’s useless bundle theory?”

An interlude on two different ways to question personal identity

“I will give you an answer to that question though I fear you will not like it. But first I want to mention a distinction drawn by Marya Schechtman, who is another narrative theorist. In fact, I don’t think that the distinction really affects her own account but it is worth having it in mind because, if you say that you are going to talk about identity, some people will expect identity politics. So let me make a connection.

“Schechtman says that her own narrative-based account of personal identity (which we are not going to discuss today) is an answer to the ‘characterization question’, which she contrasts with the more familiar ‘reidentification question’ about personal identity.

Most simply put, this [characterization] question asks which actions, experiences, beliefs, values, desires, character traits, and so on… are to be attributed to a given person. Reidentification theorists ask [by contrast] what it means to say that a person at t2 is the same personas a person at t1; characterization theorists ask what it means to say that a particular characteristic is that of a given person. [Schechtman 1996: 73].

“It might thus seem that, by answering a distinct question, her account is incommensurable with answers to the latter question proposed by other philosophers, especially those responding to Locke. But although there is one relevant difference (to which I will return), I think that Schechtman takes her narrative constitution view to be an account of personal identity, however that is to be understood, and hence to be a competitor to neo-Lockean accounts.

“In a more recent book, Schechtman summarises her earlier approach thus:

I thus suggested that we instead think of the problem of personal identity as one of characterization—the question of which actions, experiences, and traits are rightly attributable to a person. The answer to a question of personal identity can then take the form of a relation between persons and psychological elements or actions rather than of a relation between time-slices. Such an account, I argued, will be non-reductive but still informative. In particular I urged that rather than thinking of identity-constituting psychological continuity in terms of overlapping chains of psychological connections properly caused, we should instead understand it in narrative terms, a revision made possible by framing the question as one of characterization. We constitute ourselves as persons, on this view, by developing and operating with a (mostly implicit) autobiographical narrative which acts as the lens through which we experience the world. [Schechtman 2014: 100]

“The characterization question, and her answer to it, is, however, ambiguous. In asking which actions, experiences, and traits are rightly attributable to a person, it might be asking which are authentic expressions of the person, their moral selves, aspects of their deeper character by contrast with momentary whims or temptations, or the distortions of alcoholic high spirits, for example. Or it might mean simply which of all the actions in human history were those of a particular person. More prosaically, the latter might be asked by a detective of an act of theft: who did it?

“Schechtman has conceded this point about her earlier 1996 work.

For many, the switch from the reidentification to the characterization question automatically signals a switch to questions about the moral self. There are some good reasons for thinking so—my first move in introducing the view is to draw a distinction between the “Who am I?” question raised by a confused adolescent (which I link to the characterization question) and the “Who am I?” question asked by an amnesia victim (which I link to the reidentification question). At the same time, however, I meant for the characterization question also to answer questions about attribution at the most fundamental level—not only which beliefs and desires are truly mine in the sense of the moral self, but which are mine in the most basic and literal sense. [Schechtman 2014: 102]

“As I said, we are not going to talk about her account because we have already thought about two of the people she cites as key influences: Dennett and MacIntyre. And we have already seen that they are trying to do different things with narratives to shed light on personal identity. 

“But I wanted to point out that although Schechtman distinguishes between these two questions she then downplays the idea that the characterisation question concerns only those things that one values. In some contexts, however, that might be just what people mean by ‘identity’. For example, we could say that it is part of your identity that you are football-mad. That is part of who you are. That’s akin to identity politics. But that is different from saying that you are the creature who noisily stubbed their toe in the shower block and caused much fuss this morning. That is part of your identity too but in a much more Lockean ‘forensic’ sense. You are the axolotl who is to blame for the noise.That axoltl was you too. For Schechtman, narrative helps put the stubbed toe, too, in your life history.

“But, like Alisdair MacIntyre, I don’t think that that’s what we need narrative for at all.”

“Are you finally going to tell me about actual personal identity?”

A non-reductionist sketch of personal identity

“Although many philosophers assume it, as John McDowell points out, there is no need to assume that a reductionist account of the nature of personal identity especially the reidentification question, must work. He suggests instead that we should not take Locke to be trying to reduce personal identity to continuity of inner awareness (and failing at that because Locke says explicitly that a person ‘can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places’ which presupposes sameness).

“Rather, Locke is pointing out non-reductively that it is a feature of persons that they have an inner perspective on their lives which gathers together events as theirs without any criterion or test of identity and without even the exercise of a skill in picking themselves out (contrasting the way that one might keep track of one of the red balls in a game of snooker).

“One does not have to work to identify oneself to oneself, or one’s memories as one’s own rather than someone else’s. But that is not because one is a special locus of ‘mind-stuff’ or ego as Descartes assumed. No, it is because one is a body, with bodily criteria of identity, but one which happens to have – as the rational animals we are – an inner perspective too which goes hand in hand, effortlessly, and, in general, agrees with those bodily criteria.”

Lottie pauses to take this in. “So you mean that, despite what Locke seems to say, McDowell thinks that the thing that really matters is the body? What are those bodily criteria for the identity of persons over time, anyway? We’ve already agreed that bodies can change. This seems a typical cheat to me!”

Her tutor looks rueful. “Here, McDowell rather breezily suggests ‘spatio-temporal continuity under a sortal’.” It is obvious that Lottie is struggling to contain her frustrated wish to scream. Icily she says:

“Just what?!? Ok. Let’s start with what is a sort la. I think I can guess but tell me. And then what did what you - quoting McDowell - means?”

Hipparchus has starts slowly.

“Actually ‘sortal’ is one of those words that philosophy students often just pick up and don’t think much about but in fact it was first coined by Locke. He said: 

But it being evident, that things are ranked under Names into sorts or Species…the Essence of each Genus, or Sort, comes to be nothing but that abstract Idea, which the General, or Sortal (if I may have leave so to call it, from Sort, as I do General from Genus) Name stands for. And this we shall find to be that, which the word Essence imports, in its most familiar use. (Bk.III, Ch.III, 15)

“One way to make this clear how the idea of ‘spatio-temporal continuity under a sortal’ works is to imagine an alien with a very different kind of ‘bodily’ life – perhaps as a cloud of gas – studying plant and animal life on earth down as far as the cellular level but without our familiar ways of ‘chunking’ flora and fauna. As a rabbit, for example, lives, it eats grass and excretes dung. Thus vegetable matter gets merged with the rabbit and separated. Over time, there are complex chains of connection. But the spatio-temporal continuity of any particular rabbit does not have to take account of the grass and the dung with which it is causally continuous: but rather the career of the rabbit itself rather than its food or dung. In other words, an appeal to spatio-temporal continuity is not a reductionist explanation of rabbit identity over time. One already has to be familiar with what a rabbit is, what our concept ‘rabbit’ involves. The relevant mode of spatio-temporal continuity presupposes the sortal rabbit. The same applies to persons though with some complications.”

“Yes: what about the prince and the cobbler?!? This stupid account will give the wrong answer. It’s obvious that the prince is now somehow in the cobbler’s body. This happens all the time in Star Trek!”

“I did say that you wouldn’t like this account. Remember that when we discussed the philosophy of thought and the conceptual realm, you wanted to follow Ruth Millikan in reducing meaning to biological functions. That is obviously a part of your identity! Just like the accounts of Davidson and Dennett, interestingly, and McDowell and Travis of the conceptual realm, so McDowell’s sketch of an account of personal identity here is non-reductionist.”

“But what about the prince?!?” Lottie asks with exasperation.

“I agree with Locke and Star Trek that, in such a case, it seems that identity goes with the inner dimension rather than the outer body. Once we are familiar with the use of ‘self’ and ‘myself’ then the fact that the Cobbler’s mouth will use these words to speak of the prince’s past seems compelling. 

“But that is not to say that, in general, we have an understanding of the inner dimension independently of, or more fundamentally than, the normal bodily criteria of identity. I am now going to try and say almost exactly what I said when discussing self knowledge last summer. It is Sir Peter Strawson’s account. I said something like:

“To earn the right to the idea that experiences are unified as the experiences of a particular subject (a person), there has to be some way to specify or identify that subject. Without some such criteria, the idea of a single subject is vacuous. But as Hume’s description of introspection reveals, conscious experience does not yield any criteria to identify a subject (or owner) for one’s experiences. It reveals only the experiences themselves. From this, Hume concludes that there is no substantial self. 

“But there are criteria for the identification of a subject available elsewhere: third-person criteria for the ascription of experiences to fellow human beings on the basis of what they say and do. Strawson suggests that these can provide substance to the idea of a self even though they are not appealed to in self-ascriptions of experiences. This is because, while self-ascription of experiences is made without any appeal to these (or any other) criteria to identify a subject, it is still made in accord with them. 

“As Strawson puts it, ‘The links between criterionless self-ascription and empirical criteria of subject-identity are not in practice severed’ (Strawson 1966: 165). Thus, it is because we are identifiable from a third person perspective as embodied subjects located within the world that we can also self-ascribe experiences without appeal to, but still in accord with, those criteria. The third-person criteria substantiate the idea of a subject. Self-knowledge of thought is a matter of spontaneously being able to a self-ascribe in a way that will dovetail with third person ascription via radical interpretation. We learn to self-ascribe, without radical interpretation of our own actions, in a way that dovetails what others would need radical interpretation to ascribe to us.”

“So you mean that it is because I am embodied axolotl who often talks to other people that, once I have got the hang of saying, for example, that Masongill is gloomy on the evidence that he is obviously moping and kicking stones, and I have got used to people accusing me of being in a bad temper, that I learn also to say of myself - without checking who I am - that I am irritated with my tutor and with philosophy. And that the word ‘I’ on my lips picks me out, without me even trying? But my ‘self’ is linked to this body? If so, what about the Prince and the Cobbler?!?”

“Well we have a normal background and a novel, though still intuitive, extension of it. Suppose you can report what you ate for breakfast, when you last played football and that it was you who made all that fuss about a stubbed toe without ever needing to check who is speaking, whose lips are moving. Now suppose in a suitable Star Trek setting that Masongill starts giving these reports about football and fuss and you start talking about last year’s harvest of worms. Well, then, we might think that you and Masongill have somehow swapped bodies. But it does not follow that the idea of a self is only contingently connected to being an embodied person. That it is a hidden mental ego. We have added a new, highly theoretical, joint to the language game which is based on our embodiment and our ability to spontaneously self-ascribe descriptions that dovetail with descriptions that other people apply to us. The difference is that they need behavioural evidence to say we are happy or sad and we generally do not. And they need to identify

that it was we who were happy or sad, by our behaviours, whereas we do not. Do you see? We get self-identity for free.”

As so often at the end of these tutorials, Lottie is unconvinced. She wanted more. Again, it seems, she has been offered the thin gruel of 1950’s anti-reductionist linguistic philosophy.