Kenneth Rankin

Along with more frequently discussed theses, Strawson in his Chapter on Persons has maintained that the perceptual experience of the same subject could be causally dependent upon a multiplicity of bodies. But, without drastic revision, his effort to show in illustration that the visual experience of one subject might causally depend upon three different bodies is too fraught with difficulty to lend coherent support. When the difficulties are removed by revision, the truth of the thesis depends upon the truth of a particularly implausible variety of dualistic representa- tionalism. Constructive measures are required to ensure its consistency with Strawson's more salient claim 'that a necessary condition of states of consciousness being ascribed at all is that they should be ascribed to the very same things as certain corporeal characteristics'. The thesis is inconsistent with Strawson's defense of the possibility of Group Persons.

To be truly provocative and outrageous the superior philosophical sophistry will commonly possess four somewhat adventitious features. I shall rate it as classic if it has all four. First, and least adventitiously, the argument will be crisp and initially seductive. Second, by the standard the sophistry sets direct rebuttal will be laborious and diffuse. Third, the recipe for the latter will prescribe that we pick out some hitherto unarticulated logical principle such that if the principle be true then the sophistical argument must be invalid, and then, on the strength of that consequence assume the principle to be true. Consequently and fourth, as an antidote parody is supreme. With a persuasive absence of fuss and bias we can turn the tables if we show that, if the sophistical argument were really valid, then some structurally similar argument would prove just as consummately far too much. In short, from the rhetorical point of view at least, Gaunilo is more lethal than Kant. Even if the similarity is defective, the sophist will lose some of his adventitious and insufferable poise, if he ventures to show why.