Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

1. Actual or possible cases of fission present well-known problems for philosophers of identity. I canvas here a view of such cases which seems often to be overlooked or underrated. For ease of reference, let me christen it 'the multiple occupancy view': henceforth, 'the m.o. view'. What I say is relevant to recent debates about personal identity, but the problems it bears on are not only those concerning minds, brains, bodies, and personal continuity. So to avoid complications connected with those topics, I outline the m.o. view as it bears on the case of amoebic fission.
2. The m.o. view asserts the a priori possibility (and philosophical feasibility) of analyses of a certain sort ('m.o. analyses') of fission cases. (The reader must bear with a few pages of scene-setting before being told the actual content of such analyses.) Whether m.o. analyses are actually true of cases of amoebic or any other sort of fission is, I concede, an a posteriori matter. In part I defend the m.o. view by answering specific, detailed a priori objections to m.o. analyses, but my main aim is to combat what David Lewis refers to as 'the incredulous stare'.
3. Good ways of defending one's position against the incredulous stare include:
   • Showing how it can find a natural home within a more general, independently motivated framework;
   • Showing how apparently paradoxical consequences either fail to follow from it, or fail to be paradoxical; and
   • Showing the price one pays for avoiding it.
   All these strategies figure below. As 'general, independently motivated framework' I take for illustration a plausible subset of the ideas of David Wiggins₁. I try to show how the m.o. view could find a natural home amongst these ideas, how they assist in distinguishing benign from supposed paradoxical consequences of that view, and the price Wiggins pays for his rejection of it. The interest of defending the m.o. view within this framework lies not only in the importance and influence of Wiggin's ideas, but also in the prima facie inhospitability of those ideas to m.o. analyses. Certainly Wiggins offers a vehement a priori rejection of the m.o. view.
4. All this entails a fair amount of Wiggins exegesis. Perhaps 'exegesis' is too strong a word. I aim to present a general framework of ideas which I find coherent and plausible, and which are close to Wiggins's in certain respects.
5. The m.o. view, as canvassed below, is not my first choice amongst approaches to fission cases. I prefer the four-dimensionalist account (itself an m.o. analysis) presented with exemplary clarity by "Lewis (David) - Survival and Identity". But many philosophers, Wiggins amongst them, would see that treatment as condemned by its four-dimensionalist commitments alone. My aim here is to show that one can jettison those commitments and still be left with distinctive ideas about the particular problem of fission, which one can motivate within e.g. an important subset of Wiggins's general ideas about identity. It is the possibility of detaching the four-dimensionalist commitments from Lewis's treatment and still having a proposal worth taking seriously, which seems to me to have been largely overlooked₂.
6. What of 'relative identity³'? I say nothing of it, but what follows lends support (welcome or not) to Wiggins's anti-relativist crusade. Certain purported cases of 'relative identity⁴' could also be called cases of 'asymmetric fission'. The superiority, over relative identity⁵ treatments, of the Wiggins treatment of these cases is shown by the fact (unrecognised by Wiggins) that it can be extended to symmetric fission cases, whereas relativist treatments cannot. The result of such extension is just Lewis's position, shorn of its four-dimensionalist commitments.