Source
Olson (2002; substantive revision 30 June 2023), “Personal Identity”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, LIT-454, read in NOTE-374.
What was actually shown
Seven questions (§1).
- Characterization: “Who am I?” in the identity-crisis sense, a small, contingent and changeable subset of one’s properties. The term is Schechtman’s (1996: 1).
- Personhood: what it is to be a person, with Locke’s “thinking intelligent being” the commonest answer.
- Persistence: what is necessary and sufficient for a past or future being to be someone existing now.
- Evidence: how we tell, memory against physical continuity.
- Population: how many of us there are now, raised by split brains, multiple personality and partial twinning.
- Personal ontology: what we are made of and what kind of thing we are, with seven candidate answers and “no consensus or even a dominant view”.
- What matters in survival.
Discussions, the entry says, often leave unclear which one is at stake.
The persistence question is about numerical identity (§2). “Remaining the same person” in the characterization sense “presupposes” numerical identity, and concerns character. The persistence question is not about the meaning of words, which would make its answer a priori and the same for all possible people.
Its usual framing begs a question (§2). Asking what makes “a person at one time and a person at another” the same assumes person essentialism. With a Lockean definition of person, that implies you were never an embryo and could not be in a vegetative state, and a memory criterion so framed is “compatible with your surviving with no memory continuity at all, as long as this happens when you are not a person”.
“Self” is set aside. The word “is often used without any clear meaning and will be avoided here”.
What could have come out otherwise. “Remaining the same person” could have been the persistence question in other words. It is not: it asks whether a being keeps its character, which presupposes that it is numerically the same being (§2).
What this does not say
- Which answer to the persistence question is right. The entry lays out psychological-continuity views, brute-physical views and anticriterialism. It argues for animalism in §§6–7, and NOTE-374 rates the too-many-thinkers objection moderate and the reply to the transplant case weak to moderate. That argument is not part of this account.
- That the characterization question has no metaphysics. The entry places it outside persistence and so treats it as psychology. Schechtman (LIT-468, Unavailable) holds the reverse, and her publisher says she “takes issue with analytic philosophy’s emphasis on the first sort of question … to the exclusion of the second”. The record has her only through other readings.
- Anything about the self. The narrative self, the minimal self and self-models are outside the entry by decision. It is a map of persons, not of selves, which is the separation ADR-024 keeps.
- That the citations are clean. §2 cites “Olson and Witt 2020”; the bibliography’s only such entry is 2019 (NOTE-374, Limitations).
Connections
- Which question the record’s works answer (NOTE-374, Bearing on the record). Levin (LIT-439) and Clark and Chalmers (LIT-097) answer the personal-ontology question about boundaries. Dennett’s narrative self (THEORY-691) answers the characterization and population questions. None of them answers the persistence question. Locke’s criterion (THEORY-546) and Lewis’s stages (THEORY-476) do; Parfit (THEORY-447) and Dufner (THEORY-464) are about what matters.
- THEORY-060. A life story as “the form a person’s diachronic identity takes” is an answer to the characterization question, and QUESTION-043 notes that it makes no claim about numerical identity. The map says why those are different claims.
- Floridi (THEORY-650) holds that persistence questions are answerable only relative to a purpose. The entry rejects the related view that the persistence question is settled by conceptual means.
- The population question is where Dennett counts two selves in one body by interpretation, and where Meincke’s pregnancy (THEORY-448) gives a count between one and two. The entry lists partial twinning as one of its cases.