Finding ourselves : thought-experiments and personal identity
Doctoral Thesis
1994
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University of Cape Town
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Abstract
The central concern of this thesis is with the role thought-experiments play in the debate about personal identity, especially with the question of what role they should play. The thesis is divided into two parts. The first part is a defence of the use of thought-experiments against a number of influential and potentially damaging indictments of it. Some of the arguments discussed are directed at specific experiments or a specific kind of experiment, but all have implications which extend to the method in general. The thrust of my response to these arguments is that even if some objections to thought-experiments are strong enough to make us more cautious about how we use them, none of them is strong enough to require the general abandonment of the method of thought-experiment in the context of the personal identity debate. The aim of the second part is to find an answer to the question of what it is that thought-experiments can do, given that there is no prior case ruling them out altogether. The strategy is to reach an answer by a close examination of some prominent examples of thought-experiments in the literature. In the nature of my topic, there are two issues here. One is methodological, about what one can expect from a thought-experiment; the other is the substantive one as to what thought-experiments can really establish about the nature of personal identity. With regard to the methodological issue, two basic kinds of potentially informative thought-experiment emerge. There are those which serve to support or undermine a theory by revealing the relative importance of the various principles of classification which are implicit in our use of the concepts of person and personal identity. There are also those which function to show that a theory suffers from internal inconsistencies or that it has unacceptable consequences. In the process of investigating how thought-experiments can work, I argue that one view of personal identity receives stronger support from them than any of its rivals. This is a non-reductionist view which holds that while personal identity can be analysed in terms of psychological continuity, it cannot be reduced in the standardly accepted sense of that term.
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Summary in English.~Photocopy of typescript.~Bibliography: leaves 202-205.
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Beck, S. 1994. Finding ourselves : thought-experiments and personal identity. University of Cape Town.