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Internal identity is (partly) dispositional identity

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Abstract

‘Semantic externalism’ is the view that the thought and speech of internally identical subjects can have different contents, depending on facts about their environments. ‘Semantic internalism’ is the negation of this view. The details of these two views depend on the definition of ‘internal identity’. Katalin Farkas has shown that the traditional definition of internal identity as physical identity is too permissive: it misclassifies certain bodily states as internal. She has proposed defining internal identity as phenomenal identity instead. In the critical part of my paper, I argue that Farkas’s proposal fails for being too restrictive: it misclassifies non-conscious mental states, most notably dispositional belief, as external. I consider two interpretations of Farkas’s proposal but conclude that neither succeeds, because each requires internal features to influence the subject’s phenomenal life in a way in which dispositional belief does not. In the constructive part of my paper, I consider dispositional identity as an alternative definition of internal identity. I argue that the dispositional-identity definition avoids the phenomenal-identity definition’s shortcoming and retains its main attraction, viz., that of securing the subjective indistinguishability that obtains between Twin Earth duplicates. My argument that it does the latter, however, faces potentially decisive obstacles. Thus, I retreat to a disjunctive proposal: internal identity should be defined either (a) as dispositional identity or (b) as dispositional-plus-phenomenal identity. I conclude by defending my proposal against a different charge that may be levelled against it, viz., that of misclassifying Cartesian dualism as an externalist theory of the mind.

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Notes

  1. Apart from Putnam (1975), Farkas (2003, endnote 2) attributes the traditional definition to Burge (1988, p. 650), Davies (1998, p. 322), McLaughlin and Tye (1998, p. 285), Macdonald (1998, p. 124), McCulloch (1995, p. 189), Jackson and Pettit (1996, p. 220), Boghossian (1997, p. 163), and others.

  2. In fact, as Farkas (2003, p. 191; 2008, pp. 76–77; 2006b, p. 326) and others (e.g., Gertler, 2012, p. 59) have noted, the twins are not strictly physically identical in Putnam’s original scenario either, since twin-Oscar’s body will contain XYZ where Oscar’s body contains H2O. However, the meningitis case is less likely to be “brushed off”, as Gertler (ibid., p. 54) puts it, “since our stereotype about meningitis is formed on the basis of its occurrence in the human body, whereas the same is not true of water” (Farkas, 2008, p. 77).

  3. The physical-identity definition is a subtype of what Gertler (2012, Sect. 2) calls the “spatial approach” to demarcating the internal. Drawing in part on Farkas’s meningitis example, she offers a general critique of this approach. Since other instances of it are not directly relevant to my argument in this paper, and since I regard Gertler’s critique of them as decisive, I will not consider them here.

  4. Strictly speaking, phenomenal identity is a relation between experiences. For the sake of continuity and brevity, I will talk as if phenomenal identity, like physical identity, was a relation between subjects instead.

  5. Phenomenal identity competes with epistemic indiscriminability for the title of the best explanation of subjective indistinguishability. However, while remaining neutral between these two in her (2003) paper, Farkas later eschews epistemic indiscriminability and endorses phenomenal identity (2008, chapter 5). Parrott and Gomes (2021, Sect. 5) defend a version of the epistemic-indiscriminability definition of internal identity. For more on this, see footnote 31.

  6. The internalist sense of content has become known as 'narrow content' in the literature, in contradistinction with the externalist sense of 'broad content' (e.g., Jackson and Pettit, 1996). Throughout the rest of this paper, all talk about the content of dispositional belief is to be understood in the narrow sense, unless otherwise stated.

  7. I am not the first person to take issue with Farkas’s proposal. Gertler (2012, p. 61) criticizes it on the grounds that it “ensures that externalism is incompatible with privileged first-person access, as a definitional matter”, “renders externalism about the phenomenal incoherent”, and “has difficulty making sense of the pivotal externalist claim that some intensional thought contents are wide”. In a similar vein, Parrott and Gomes (2021, pp. 323–324) object to it on the grounds that it misclassifies instances of “phenomenal externalism” as internalist views. My reason for resisting Farkas’s proposal is different from any of these and suggests a way of improving upon her proposal. That said, I will return to the theory misclassification problem that the aforementioned are raising in Sect. 5.

  8. A difference in the narrow contents of their dispositional beliefs, that is. Recall footnote 6.

  9. While I am using dispositionalism about NONs to frame my paper, it is worth noting that my critique of Farkas’s proposal at least does not depend on this substantive metaphysical view. It only requires that NONs exist in some form or other. Anyone who accepts their existence will also accept that they fail to affect their bearers’ phenomenal lives, whenever they are not being consciously attended to. I find dispositionalism to be an intuitive way of articulating this thought, but it is not the only way. For some alternatives, see Schwitzgebel (2019, Sect. 1). For his discussion of the relationship between dispositionalism and Twin Earth cases, which has inspired my own, see his (2002, Sect. 5.1).

  10. TWIN EARTH 4 is inspired by Frankfurt’s (1969, pp. 835–836) thought experiment involving a person named “Black”, who is on standby and ready to temper with the nervous system of a person named “Jones” in such a way as to change Jones’s intentions: if neurosurgery can conceivably alter intention in this way, then it can conceivably alter other NONs as well, including belief.

    It is worth noting that Frankfurt’s thought experiment is not the only piece of canon that supports the broader lesson of TWIN EARTH 4. The broader lesson is that identity of current mental dispositions can come apart from identity of past phenomenal histories. As Katalin Farkas has helpfully pointed out to me, Davidson’s (1987, pp. 443–444) thought experiment involving a “Swampman replica” is another especially straightforward case in point: by hypothesis, Swampman replicas have the same mental dispositions but fail to have the same phenomenal histories as the subjects they replicate (by virtue of lacking phenomenal histories altogether).

  11. Thanks to Katalin Farkas and Brie Gertler for pressing me on this point and for recommending the limitation to phenomenal dispositions. Thanks also to an anonymous reviewer for asking me to unpack the notion.

  12. I am borrowing liberally from Schwitzgebel’s (2002, Sects. 1 and 2) “phenomenal dispositionalism” about belief, which he presents as an improvement upon its behaviorist ancestors, tracing them back to Ryle (1949). I follow most of Schwitzgebel’s terminology and basic assumptions about the metaphysics of dispositions. Like him, I also remain agnostic about “[e]xactly what the connection is between [an object’s] having [a] dispositional property […] and the truth of the conditional statement associated with that disposition” (2002, p. 250). Unlike me, however, Schwitzgebel (ibid., p. 252) would regard the disposition to think that “water” is H2O as cognitive, rather than phenomenal, because thoughts are “not wholly characterizable phenomenally”. My bar for phenomenal dispositions is lower: it is enough to have as its manifestation a type of mental feature that bears phenomenal qualities, which includes all of what I have labelled ‘CONs’. This allows me to omit Schwitzgebel’s category of cognitive dispositions from my taxonomy and distinguish only behavioral and phenomenal ones.

    More importantly, my argument presupposes that identity of phenomenal dispositions is sufficient for identity of dispositional beliefs, while Schwitzgebel’s account may entail that identity of certain behavioral dispositions is necessary as well. (Whether it does depends on how we are to unpack his notion of a “dispositional stereotype”. In his (ibid., Sect. 5.1) discussion of Twin Earth cases, he argues that this flexibility is a virtue of his account because it allows him to appease semantic internalists and externalists alike.) But my argument may stand even if such a requirement exists. For note that identity of phenomenal dispositions plausibly entails identity of many behavioral dispositions: if both twins are phenomenally disposed to experience a desire for what they call “beer” and to remember that there is “beer” in the fridge, then they will plausibly be behaviorally disposed to retrieve “beer” from the fridge. And even if not, the dispositional-identity definition could be salvaged by allowing certain behavioral dispositions back into its scope. The Goldilocks zone will be that which excludes all those dispositions that fly under the radar of the subject’s phenomenology, while including all those that are part of the dispositional stereotype of belief. Following Schwitzgebel’s (ibid., p. 254) inclination, we can say that the latter depends on folk psychology, so the Goldilocks zone may just be within reach. The disposition to retrieve “beer” from the fridge, for instance, is folk-psychological but not sub-phenomenal, while the related disposition to retrieve something that is mostly H2O (rather than XYZ) is sub-phenomenal but not folk-psychological.

  13. For ease of exposition, I am skipping an important qualification here, which I will note presently. The fragility example is common in the literature (e.g., Johnston, 1992, p. 233).

  14. I owe this objection, together with the term ‘phenomenal blip’, to Brie Gertler.

  15. This resolves the promissory note of footnote 13. In the literature on dispositions, the packaging is commonly called a 'mask' and the sorcerer a 'fink'. The canonical statements of these examples are due to Johnston (1992, p. 233) and Lewis (1997, p. 147), respectively. See also Manley and Wasserman (2008). Thanks to Jesse Steinberg for helpful discussion.

  16. For several examples of ways in which phenomenal dispositions can be masked or finked, see Schwitzgebel (2002, Sect. 2), who calls such interveners “excuses”.

  17. I owe this objection, together with the nausea example, to Brie Gertler as well.

  18. This admittedly presupposes that the universe is fundamentally deterministic, which quantum physics calls into question. Since my conclusion is going to be sufficiently hedged to survive the problem of phenomenal blips either way, I will not get into this debate. Thanks to Brie Gertler for pressing me on this.

  19. This example is inspired by Williamson’s point that “[c]astles became more vulnerable when gunpowder was introduced” (forthcoming, emphasis in the original).

  20. Farkas (2008, pp. 94–95) mentions “the disjunctive theory of perception” as an exemplary externalist theory. Parrott and Gomes (2021, pp. 323–324) mention “naïve realism” and Dretske’s “phenomenal externalism”.

  21. Which one it is depends on a question in the metaphysics of dispositions that I have remained agnostic about, viz., how possession of a disposition is connected to the truth of the associated conditional. See footnote 12.

  22. As Schwitzgebel (2019, Sect. 1.2) puts it, physicalism about the mind has been so influential that even just failing to advance the project “might be seen as an important drawback” of a given analysis in terms of phenomenal dispositions. However, as he points out elsewhere (2002, p. 258), those without a “materialist or behaviorist agenda” may remain unfazed by this concern. Since I share his lack of such an agenda, I also share his ease of mind.

  23. It is worth noting that I am unsure if we actually are committed to the existence of the internal-identity relation in any metaphysically deep sense: even if internal identity never really obtains between two subjects, we will still be able to posit it between Twin Earth duplicates. Perhaps this paves another path for eluding an answer to the grounding question. However, I will not pursue this path here.

  24. On an alternative interpretation, such a disposition would be grounded in a disjunction, but in a context-invariant way. Since the example is only intended to explain what I mean by ‘context-sensitive’, I am ignoring this alternative.

  25. It is worth noting that I am unsure if it would. Consider the right to be declared winner of the New York Marathon. This wholly abstract right is partly grounded in the spatiotemporal event of reaching the finish line ahead of all other competitors. Thus, entities that are (wholly) abstract can have grounds that are (partly) spatiotemporal. If so, then why think that features that are internal to the subject cannot have grounds that are external to the subject? (If anything, the divide between the abstract and the spatiotemporal is deeper than that between the internal and the external.) The answer may be that extensional adequacy problems similar to the ones discussed in Sects. 2 and 3 are rearing their heads. Since settling this would require a closer look at the metaphysics of grounding, I will not pursue it here.

  26. Many thanks to an anonymous reviewer for raising the grounding question, and in particular for asking whether I can allow the grounds of phenomenal dispositions to be context-sensitive and external to the subject.

  27. As Gertler (2012, p. 55) notes, Burge (2003, p. 302) has gone on record as condemning his own (1986) earlier use of the physical-identity definition precisely because it misclassifies Descartes as an externalist. This suggests that he would not consider the subscription maneuver a viable way of salvaging a given definition of internal identity. But as Farkas (2003, p. 190) notes, Putnam (1975, p. 227) makes room for the possibility that internal identity needs to be defined differently for Cartesian dualists. This implies some degree of sympathy for the subscription maneuver, on his part. Thus, philosophical authority seems to be pulling in opposite directions and should not be relied on without qualification here (or, indeed, anywhere else).

  28. These have been popularized by another one of Putnam’s papers (1981), and in close proximity to his defense of semantic externalism.

  29. A Putnam-style solution to external world skepticism is essentially an application of the lessons from Twin Earth to the brain in a vat problem. (See the first part of DeRose and Warfield’s (1999) seminal collection.) Thus, the two contexts must be using the same sense of internal identity, if this type of solution is going to work.

  30. She considers three broad approaches to defining internal identity, with multiple representatives each: a “spatial approach” that includes the physical-identity definition (2012, Sect. 2), an “epistemic approach” (ibid., Sect. 3), and a “neutral approach” (ibid., Sect. 4).

  31. According to their (2021, Sect. 5) proposal, Twin Earth duplicates are internally identical if and only if their cases are introspectively indiscriminable from each other. This is an instance of the broader epistemic-indiscriminability approach to defining internal identity, which Farkas (2006a, 2008, chapter 5) and Gertler (2012, Sect. 3) have problematized. Parrott and Gomes take their proposal to evade those criticisms. Since my ambition to put the dispositional-identity approach on the map does not depend on the outcome of this dispute, I will not comment on it here.

  32. Note that the literature on the “boundary of the mind” or “mark of the cognitive” in philosophy of cognitive science is orthogonal to the issues surrounding semantic externalism that I have been focussing on here. That literature concerns what has become known as “active externalism”, “the extended mind view”, or “vehicle externalism”. Gertler (2012, p. 64), too, points out that definitions of internal identity for Twin Earth duplicates cannot be expected to cover vehicle externalism as well. For the canonical defence of the view, see Clark and Chalmers (1998).

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Acknowledgements

I have many people to thank. (Apologies to any I miss!) My special thanks belong to Katalin Farkas and Brie Gertler, without whose comments and discussions this paper would surely not have reached its final stage. For further comments, I am grateful to Azul Santibañez Méndez, Ying Huang, two anonymous reviewers for this journal, and two anonymous examiners for the BPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford. For further discussions, I am grateful to Jacob Swett, Farid Masrour, Jesse Steinberg and the participants of his graduate seminar on dispositions at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring semester of 2019, attendees of the poster session at the Fifth Philosophy of Language and Mind Network Conference at the University of St Andrews in 2019, members of the MadMindLab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the spring semester of 2021, and audiences at the following conferences: the 2018 Graduate Philosophy Conference of the Instituto de Investigaciones Filosóficas at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, the 2019 Mark L. Shapiro Graduate Philosophy Conference at Brown University, and the 2021 Central Division Meeting of the American Philosophical Association.

Funding

Partial financial support was received from the Graduate School, part of the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and UW-Madison. Interests: The author has no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

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Bruckner, M. Internal identity is (partly) dispositional identity. Synthese 200, 271 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-022-03747-2

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