ADR-015: self-and-personhood joins the topics, and identity becomes individuation

Context

The owner asked how the record covers identity, personhood and selfhood. 39 works carried identity, and they were about three different things:

• Individuation and identity of things: structural realism, quasi-sets, dualities, the Yoneda lemma, criteria of identity.
• Biological individuality: Bourrat, Wilson, Griesemer, Lloyd, the organism.
• Personal identity and the self: Dufner, Floridi, Velleman, Frankfurt, Dennett, Hofstadter, Minsky’s self-models, Levin’s selves, the extended self.

A reader browsing identity for the self met quasi-set theory first. The self material was hard to find and hard to see the gaps in. The record held almost none of the personal-identity literature its cognitive-science and AI readings answer to. The owner asked for that literature to be filed and for this word to be added.

Decision

Add self-and-personhood to topics, in the philosophy group beside identity, consciousness, cognition and emotion-and-affect. Its blurb names personal identity, the narrative, minimal and bodily self, self-models, agency over one’s own life, and machine or group selves.

identity’s blurb narrows to “individuation, individuality and persistence of things of any kind”. It points the self and the person to the new word.

identity is renamed individuation. Once the self has left it, what the word holds is the individuation of things: what makes something one thing and the same thing, numerically identical to or distinct from another, an individual organism, persisting through change. “Identity” read alone invites the personal sense the decision just moved out, and a reader browsing for the self would still land there first. The word’s 41 bearers change in place, in the same tag position; no work gains or loses a topic, so no relation’s tag invariant changes. The blurb keeps numerical identity and “across descriptions” by name, because the structuralist and quasi-set readings are about exactly that. Notes and curation entries written before the rename keep saying identity; they record what the tag was called when they were written.

Retagged. No tag was removed, so no relation’s tag invariant loses a value.

• First tag: LIT-130 (Dufner), LIT-136 (Floridi), LIT-405 (“Where Am I?”), LIT-442 (“Narrative Gravity”), LIT-423 (I Am a Strange Loop), LIT-413 (The Mind’s I).
• Second tag:
  • LIT-142 (Meincke, on pregnancy);
  • LIT-292 (Velleman) and LIT-293 (Frankfurt);
  • LIT-416 (Hofstadter, “Is there an ‘I’ in AI?”);
  • LIT-432 (The Emotion Machine’s self-models);
  • LIT-439 (Levin’s selves);
  • LIT-097 (the extended self).
• Last tag: LIT-437 (GEB), whose “I” is a strange loop but whose subject is wider.

The personal-identity literature filed in the same contribution takes the new word.

Alternatives

• Leave personal identity under identity. That keeps one word for three subjects. The biology readings already show the cost: individuality of organisms and personal identity share a vocabulary and almost nothing else.
• Two words, personal-identity and self. The persistence question and the “what is a self” question are argued in the same papers. Parfit, Schechtman and Dennett’s “Narrative Gravity” each answer both. Splitting them would split those papers.
• Keep the name identity. It is the established word in metaphysics, but in this vocabulary it now sits beside self-and-personhood, and the everyday reading of “identity” is the personal one. The name would keep sending the wrong reader to the wrong page.
• Move biological individuality out too. Bourrat and Wilson are about what makes something one individual, which is what identity now says. They stay, and are much of why individuation is the right name.