Abstract
The question of transtemporal identity of objects in general and persons in particular is an important issue in both philosophy and psychology. While the focus of philosophers traditionally was on questions of the nature of identity relation and criteria that allow to settle ontological issues about identity, psychologists are mostly concerned with how people think about identity, and how they track identity of objects and people through time. In this article, we critically engage with widespread use of inferring folk judgments of identity from study participants’ use of proper names in response to experimental vignettes. We provide reasons to doubt that using this method one can reliably infer judgments of numerical identity over time and transformations. We also critically examine allegedly-Kripkean justification of this method and find it lacking. Merely assuming that names are rigid designators will not help. A study participant’s use of proper names can be taken to track the participant’s identity judgments only if supported by the participant’s belief that names used in the scenario are used rigidly.
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Notes
One may wonder whether it is at all possible to construct scenarios that (a) do not assume that pre- and post-transformation individuals are identical, while (b) still seem to be a coherent story in a sense that there is something that we talk about throughout the story. However, we will not press this issue further and simply grant for the sake of argument, that such hypothetical scenarios are available to researchers.
The latter, although not explicitly mentioned in Kripke’s text in this phrasing, is perfectly consistent with and can be derived from what he says.
We suspect that this phenomenon of “qualitative” use of names can potentially explain the results of a number of studies that found study participants’ decreased agreement with a claim that post-transformation individual is “still John” in scenarios involving deterioration of memory or moral character. However, we will not attempt to address this issue here.
Note, that possibility of “qualitative” and “stand-in” uses of proper names pose challenges to the method of inferring identity judgments from participants’ use of proper names independently of success of the Kripkean justification.
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Acknowledgements
An earlier version of this paper was presented at Vilnius University, University of Warsaw, Boğaziçi University, University of Helsinki, and Academia Grammaticorum Salensis. We wish to thank the audiences at these events for suggestions on how to improve the paper. We also thank two anonymous reviewers for this journal for their valuable suggestions.
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Dranseika, V., Dagys, J. & Berniūnas, R. Proper Names, Rigidity, and Empirical Studies on Judgments of Identity Across Transformations. Topoi 39, 381–388 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9528-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-017-9528-y