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Strategy for Animalism

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Abstract

The central argument for animalism is the thinking animal problem (TAP): if you are not an animal, there are two thinkers within the region you occupy, i.e., you and your animal body. This is absurd. So you are an animal. The main objection to this argument is the thinking brain problem (TBP): animalism faces a problem that is structurally analogous to TAP. Specifically, if animalism is true, you and your brain both think. This is absurd. So animalism is false. The purpose of this paper is to propose strategies animalists can endorse to solve TBP. I first show that animalists can solve TBP by arguing that it is not sound. This solution to TBP raises questions about personal identity over time and the mereological relation between the person and the brain. I argue that animalists can answer the personal identity question by endorsing non-biological persistence conditions as well as biological ones. For the mereological question, I first show that animalism is incompatible with four-dimensionalism and eliminativism. I then argue that animalists should endorse the dominant sortal account to answer the mereological question.

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Notes

  1. For this line of reasoning, see Carter (1988), Mackie (1999a), Merricks (2001, pp. 85–86), Olson (1997, pp. 106–107; 2007, pp. 35–39), Snowdon (1990), and van Inwagen (1990, p. 290, n. 45).

  2. Olson (2007, pp. 215–219) considers a more general version of the thinking brain problem, according to which every part of the person containing a brain (e.g., upper halves, left-hand complements) is a candidate for being a thinker. He calls this the ‘thinking parts problem.’ However, it is controversial whether there are such super-cellular parts (cf. Burke 2003). Stipulation: in this paper, I shall assume that there are no super-cellular parts of a person. I rather focus on TBP because most of us (except for eliminativists, as we shall see in Sect. 4) believe that there are brains.

  3. Some might want to develop a similar solution appealing to Thomasson’s idea about ‘analytic entailment’ (Thomasson 2007). They might say that the claim about the person “analytically entails” (this is Thomasson’s term) the claim about the brain, and vice versa. In other words, the truth of the claim about the person guarantees the truth of the claim about the brain. On this solution, ‘I think’ analytically entails ‘My brain thinks.’ Because there is “no rivalry” between the two claims, a competent speaker can infer one from the other. In fact, our imagined objectors might say that there is only one thinker inside my skin because they would count the number of thinkers by analytic entailment. However, if ‘I think’ entails ‘My brain thinks,’ we need to know why. The analytic entailment view simply says that a competent person uses language in a certain way to count entities. But it does not explain why we should use language in that way, even though the person and her brain are two distinct entities. So I believe the analytic entailment view is a linguistic solution and not an ontological one (cf. Baker, “Amie Thomasson on Ordinary Objects”). After all, TBP is not about how we use language to refer to a thinker. It is rather a serious ontological problem. It is about whether there is a thinker that is psychologically indistinguishable from me. I also reject counting the number of thinkers by analytic entailment for similar reasons I shall reject the present solution to TBP in the text.

  4. Sutton (2014) attempts to solve TAP by arguing that it is not valid: the animal’s thinking is not additive to the person’s thinking so there is no multiplication of thinkers, even though the person is not identical with the animal. But if my argument in this paper is correct, her solution to TAP fails.

  5. For an objection to Blatti’s ‘animal ancestors argument,’ see Gillett (2013). After all, what TAP implies is that each of us is an animal in the sense of being identical with one (e.g., the only thinker within the region a person occupies). I believe animalists would accept this implication.

  6. By using this reasoning, Lowe (2001) argues that animalists should abandon animalism to solve TBP. For this argument, he, of course, assumes that (1) and (2) are true. Campbell and McMahan (2010) and Parfit (2012) would also say (3) is false because they believe the person is her thinking part, such as a brain or cerebrum. This ‘embodied person view’ is obviously incompatible with animalism.

  7. It seems that Parfit denies the existence of persons, but he actually does not endorse eliminativism (nihilism) about persons (Parfit 1984, p. 341).

  8. For recent discussions of various versions of animalism, see Bailey (2015) and Thornton (2016).

  9. Johnston (2007) develops the ‘remnant person problem,’ which is analogous to the BIV case. He argues that if animalism is true, then you cannot be the detached brain (or cerebrum) and this leads to a dilemma: either the remnant person has been with the person until its detachment, or suddenly comes into existence. Neither option is plausible. So, he concludes, animalism is false. But Johnston’s argument attacks only one version of animalism, the view that we as animals have entirely biological persistence conditions. Animalists can identify you with the remnant person and argue that biological continuity is not necessary for personal identity. With this strategy, animalists can also argue that Johnston’s own psychological continuity theory faces a dilemma analogous to the remnant person problem (Johnston 1987). Suppose that you lapse into a persistent vegetative state. If psychological continuity is necessary for you to persist, you are not the living organism in this state. This leads to two options: either it has been with you until you lose mental states, or comes into existence when you perish. Neither option is plausible. So it is not the case that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. This obviously goes against Johnston’s psychological criterion of personal identity.

  10. Constitutionalists, such as Baker (2000), Johnston (1987), Noonan (1998), and Shoemaker (2008), do not find this problematic. But animalism is incompatible with constitutionalism as animalists attack it by appeal to TAP: constitutionalism leads to the multiplication of thinkers.

  11. I believe animalists do not want to consider other theories, such as constitutionalism (for the reason discussed in the text and in footnote 10) and mereological essentialism (animalists typically say we can persist over time by gaining or losing parts).

  12. So these eliminativists would disagree with Unger (1979). As I said in Sect. 2, the goal of this paper is to develop the animalist solution to TBP. So I assume that eliminativism about persons is incompatible with animalism.

  13. Van Inwagen says that if atoms arranged brainwise in one’s head are detached and kept functioning in a vat, a life flows into the ‘brain’ in a vat. As a result, atoms arranged brainwise in a vat compose an object. He thinks this object is not a brain but the original human animal that is whittled down to brain size. So, on his view, the brain still does not exist in a vat, as well as in one’s head. See van Inwagen (1990, pp. 172–173).

  14. For the ‘remnant person problem,’ see footnote 9.

  15. For a more detailed discussion on the incompatibility of animalism and eliminativism, see Lim (2017).

  16. For the history of this puzzle, see Rea (1997, xviii). Recall that my argument in this paper focuses on the thinking brain problem only. So I use the Tib–Tibble case to make an analogy to that, not its more general version, i.e., the thinking parts problem. See footnote 2 for my stipulation about super-cellular parts of a person.

  17. According to Rea, “an object satisfies a sortal in the classificatory way just in case that sortal gives the metaphysically best answer to the “What is it?” question for that object, and an object satisfies a sortal in the nominal way just in case the object exemplifies the distinctive qualitative features of those things that satisfy the sortal in the classificatory way” (Rea 2000, p. 172). If this is correct, the BIV is a person in the classificatory sense and a brain in the nominal sense.

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Acknowledgements

Earlier versions of this paper have been presented at the Midsouth Philosophy Conference and the North Carolina Philosophical Society meeting.  I am grateful to the audiences on those occasions for insightful questions and comments.  I am also grateful to two anonymous referees, Bill Faw, and Jeremy Skrzypek for very helpful comments.

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    Joungbin Lim

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Lim, J. Strategy for Animalism. Axiomathes 28, 419–433 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-018-9378-2

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