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Natural Kinds and Unnatural Persons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Patricia Kitcher
Patricia Kitcher
Affiliation:
University of Vermont
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Extract

Most people believe that extraterrestrial beings or porpoises or computers could someday be recognized as persons. Given the significant constitutional differences between these entities and ourselves, the general assumption appears to be that ‘person’ is not a natural kind term. David Wiggins offers an illuminating challenge to this popular dogma in ‘Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness: and Men as a Natural Kind’. Wiggins does not claim that ‘person’ actually is a natural kind term; but he argues hard for the advantages of regarding it as something like a natural kind classification. The problem is that, whatever its merits, there are obvious and fatal objections to the view that person is a natural kind. My aim is to present a modification of the natural kind thesis which avoids these objections and retains the attractions of the basic position.

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 54 , Issue 210 , October 1979 , pp. 541 - 547
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1979

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References

1 Wiggins, 's paper appears in both Philosophy 51, (1976), 131–158CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Rorty, Amelie's The Identities of Persons (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1976), 139–173Google Scholar. Page references in the text are to the former source.

2 A ‘person-stage’ is a temporal part or portion of an enduring person. Cf. Perry, John, ‘Can the Self Divide?’, Journal of Philosophy 69, No. 16 (7 09 1972), 466–467CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Two person-stages would be ‘gen-identical’ if they are parts of the same person. Perry calls the gen-identity relation the ‘unity relation’ and gives a clear explanation of this relation on p. 468. ‘Gen-identity’ is Carnap's term; cf. Introduction to Symbolic Logic and Its Applications (New York: Dover, 1958), 198–200Google Scholar. I use it because I think it is more widely known. In Carnap's system, gen-identity is an equivalence relation. In my discussion, I do not assume that gen-identity has this property.

3 Cf. Perry, op. cit., and Lewis, David, ‘Survival and Identity’Google Scholar, also in Rorty, , op. cit., 17–40.Google Scholar

4 Cf. ‘Is Semantics Possible ?’, Metaphihsophy 3 (1970), 187–201Google Scholar, and ‘Meaning and Reference’, Journal of Philosophy 70, No. 19 (8 11 1973), 699–711.Google Scholar

5 I have been unable to find any interpretation of the cited passage which does not conflict with Wiggins's earlier remarks or attribute to him an implausible position.

6 The view that the categories of common sense psychological theory cut across physiological categories has been defended by, among others, Davidson, Donald in ‘Mental Events’, Experience and Theory, Foster, Lawrence and Swanson, J. W. (eds) (University of Massachusetts Press, 1970), 79–101.Google Scholar

7 The connection between common-sense psychology and the concept of a person is exploited in a different way by John Perry in ‘The Importance of Being Identical’, which also appears in Amélie Rorty's anthology. I discuss this connection in more detail in ‘The Crucial Relation in Personal Identity’, The Canadian Journal of Philosophy 8, No. 1 (03 1978), 131–145.Google Scholar

8 I am not particularly worried about the charge of analyticity, because many uncontroversial laws also seem analytic. Even if they are analytic, the generalizations of common sense psychology might still be laws. For interesting discussions of the possibility that scientific laws may be analytic or quasi-analytic, cf. Lewis, David, ‘How to Define Theoretical Terms’, Journal of Philosophy 67, No. 13 (9 07 1970), 427–438CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Kyburg, Henry E. Jr, ‘A Defense of Conventionalism’, Noûs 11, No. 4 (05 1977), 75–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The possibility that the laws of biology might be analytic a posteriori is actually raised by Wiggins, in Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1967)Google Scholar, Appendix 5.1, 59–60.

9 The considerations I raise to resolve the amnesia case can also be used to settle identity questions in cases of artificially created splitting, such as ‘Alfred’ above. The answer would be that Al and Alfred before the split constitute a continuing person, and that Fred and Alfred before the split constitute a continuing person. In the articles cited in note 3, David Lewis and John Perry work out some details of this type of solution. If person-stages and overlapping persons are not tolerated, then the law-governed kind view could do nothing with these cases, but dismiss them as not relevant to identity judgments in normal cases (see above p. 543).

10 I am grateful to Philip Kitcher and George Sher for helpful comments on an earlier draft.