Sydney Shoemaker

_Opposing perspectives offer deep insight into identity_ _Personal Identity_ explores the idea of identity by way of a debate between prominent philosophers with competing points of view. Richard Swinburne presents personal identity in the context of dualism, while Sydney Shoemaker argues a materialist's perspective in contrast. With each theory presented individually with illustrations and clear explanations, the second part of the book is devoted to each author's reply and rebuttal to his opponent's ideas. Whether exploring personal identity for the first time or delving deeper into an established philosophical niche, this book offers a lively discussion with much insight and room for analysis.

The chapter defends the claim that there can be coincident entities, different entities composed of the very same matter. Part of its aim is to explain how such entities can differ in their properties – as persons differ from their bodies. The explanation draws on a distinction between _thin_ properties and _thick_ properties, and between two ways, _weak_ embedding and _strong_ embedding, in which the microphysical realizers of property instances can be embedded in the career of an object, giving it MSE-properties (microphysical state of affairs embedding properties). Coincident objects share all of their thin properties, but can differ in their thick properties. The instantiation of thin properties consists in the weak embedding of microphysical realizers, while the instantiation of thick properties consists in the strong embedding of the microphysical realizers, and there can be the former without the latter. Objections to the possibility of coincident objects are considered and answered.

Persons are animals; what they are not is “biological animals,” i.e. creatures whose persistence conditions are purely biological and not psychological. They are coincident with biological animals, and constituted by them, but not identical with them. Distinguishing “thin” properties that can be shared by things of different kinds and “thick” properties that are internally related to the persistence conditions of particular kinds provides an answer to the “too many minds” objection to the coincidence view; a person and its coincident biological animal share the same thin physical properties, but they do not share the same thick properties, including mental properties. This chapter shows that if, as some animalists think, the existence of a biological animal ends with death, then a person’s body, which can survive as a corpse, will be coincident with (and nonidentical with) both the person and the biological animal.

The chapter defends the view that there is a constitutive relation between believing something and believing that one believes it. This view is supported by the incoherence of affirming something while denying that one believes it, and by the role awareness of the contents one’s belief system plays in the rational regulation of that system. Not all standing beliefs are accompanied by higher-order beliefs that self-ascribe them; those that are so accompanied are ones that are ‘available’ in the sense that their subjects are poised to assent to their contents, to use them as premises in reasoning, and to be guided by them in their behavior. The account is compatible with the possibility of negative self-deception – mistakenly believing that one doesn’t believe something – but the closest thing to positive self-deception it allows is believing falsely that a belief with a certain content is one’s dominant belief on a certain matter through failure to realize that one has a stronger belief that contradicts it. The view has implications about Moore’s paradox that contradict widely held views. On this view self-ascriptions of beliefs can be warranted and grounded on reasons – but the reasons are not phenomenally conscious mental states (as held by Christopher Peacocke) but rather available beliefs.

Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward‐looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward‐looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused. Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical. Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity. Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that statements like “Gold is an element” are metaphysically necessary.

Let thin properties be properties shared by coincident entities, e.g., a person and her body, and thick properties ones that are not shared. Thick properties entail sortal properties, e.g., being a person, and the associated persistence conditions. On the first account of realization defined here, the realized property and its realizers will belong to the same individual. This restricts the physical realizers of mental properties, which are thick, to thick physical properties. We also need a sense in which mental properties can be realized in thin physical properties shared by a person and her body. Defining this in turn requires defining a sense in which the instantiations of sortal properties and of thick properties are realized in micro‐structural states of affairs. A fourth notion of realization is needed to allow for the possibility of coincident entities that share a sortal property, e.g., coincident persons.

How can we reconcile representationalism about phenomenal character — the view that the phenomenal character of experiences is fixed by their representational content — with the view that how things appear to different subjects, and so the phenomenal character of their experiences of them, can differ without there being any misperception? That is, how can we reconcile representationalism with the possibility of ‘spectrum inversion?’ One view says that what in the first instance are represented by perceptual experiences are ‘appearance properties,’ which things have in virtue of producing or being disposed to produce experiences of certain sorts, and that different perceivers can perceive the same objective property, e.g. the same color, by perceiving and representing different appearance properties. Here, this is replaced by the view that properties like colors have multiple qualitative characters, and that perceivers with somewhat different perceptual systems can be such that they perceive the same property color by being sensitive to different qualitative characters of that property, and represent it by representing different qualitative characters.

Any property has two sorts of causal features: “forward-looking” ones, having to do with what its instantiation can contribute to causing, and ldquo;backward-looking” ones, having to do with how its instantiation can be caused. Such features of a property are essential to it, and properties sharing all of their causal features are identical. Causal necessity is thus a special case of metaphysical necessity. Appeals to imaginability have no more force against this view than they do against the Kripkean view that statements like “Gold is an element” are metaphysically necessary

The author addresses remarks he considers fallacious made by panayot butchvarov concerning russell's views on the nature of language ("on denoting"). Butchvarov thought that russell and wittgenstein were advancing purely empirical theories. The author claims that this is patently false in the case of wittgenstein and only partially true of russell. Russell "did "not" hold, But emphatically denied, That every word in a significant sentence must correspond to an element in reality." the author holds that russell's principle about constituents "applies to all propositions that we can think about." (staff)