Replies to Baker, Markosian & Zimmerman
Olson (Eric)
Source: Abstracta Special Issue I – 2008 (Brazil)
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Write-up1 (as at 19/07/2026 17:52:48): Olson - Replies to Baker, Markosian & Zimmerman

Introductory Note
Reply to "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Big-Tent Metaphysics"

This is a review of that part of "Olson (Eric) - Replies to Baker, Markosian & Zimmerman" (where Olson replies to his critics, Baker3, Markosian4 and Zimmerman5) that deals with his response to "Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Big-Tent Metaphysics". Baker felt sufficiently incensed by Olson’s reply that she wrote a complaint ("Baker (Lynne Rudder) - Response to Eric Olson").

Olson kicks off by noting how he and Baker forever seem to talk past and misrepresent one another.
  1. Olson doesn’t deny the existence of people; he just claims that they have the same identity conditions as cats.
    • As usual, Olson uses the term PEOPLE, which the uninitiated might consider to be equivalent to the plural of the term PERSON, but which he means to be equivalent to the term HUMAN ANIMAL (or maybe HUMAN BEING). He avoids using the term of art PERSON because he thinks introducing the term PERSON as distinct from (say) HUMAN BEING prejudges the case against animalism – but I don’t think it does. At least you shouldn’t legislate any view out of existence by completely ignoring the opposition’s terms of art. So, Olson doesn’t deny the existence of people (human beings) but he does deny the existence of (human) persons, if they are supposed to be entities other than human animals.
    • I need to add an article6 on PEOPLE to my list of philosophical nuggets.
  2. Olson also accepts the existence of chairs and flowers, things that an earlier draft of Baker’s paper implied that he’d left out of his metaphysics.
    • This is in a footnote, and a discussion of artefacts appears later in paper. From the footnote it appears that Olson is not a reductionist. However, I’m not sure about this, or even if it’s relevant. What I think he does deny is the existence of artefacts – in the same way that he denies the existence of persons – if they are understood as ontologically separable from the matter – or organisms – that are co-located with them (I keep wanting to say “that constitute them”, though not necessarily in Baker’s technical sense). So, he would deny that a wooden table can gradually metamorphose7 into one of metal, in the same way that he denies that a person can gradually metamorphose8 into a machine. That said, PERSON and MACHINE might be seen as belonging to different categories. What doesn’t metamorphose9 into the machine is the human animal. By Baker’s lights, the person isn’t metamorphosing at all. But this is just the same old disagreement as to what exists. Olson also think there’s something fishy about tables in the first place.
  3. Olson doesn’t ignore all that’s distinctive and non-biological about our careers, he just denies that they are relevant to or identity conditions.
    • But Olson does ignore Baker’s ontological claims: namely, that there’s an ontological difference between human persons and human animals. As I’ve said elsewhere, I think Olson should argue that he has already taken this ontological difference into account by acknowledging that human animals are members of the species homo sapiens whose typical members have a FPP10 during extended portions of their lives. Then he hasn’t missed anything out. He can still deny that the very same FPP11 is transferable, if he wants to (though I don’t think he does) but he doesn’t deny its existence and importance.
Olson now considers Baker’s claim that she might gradually metamorphose12 into an inorganic machine, provided it had her FPP13. Olson denies that denying this is “totally ad hoc”. He’s argued that Baker is a biological organism, and both he and Baker are agreed that a biological organism cannot come to be an inorganic one.
  • Just what is wrong with metamorphosis14 or cyborgisation? That a think cannot change its primary kind? This is because the persistence conditions of a thing are sortal-relative – cf. Wiggins. Could we deny this? The alternative is to insist that the cyborg is a whittled-down (“maximally mutilated”) human being with inorganic bits attached. This option isn’t open in the case of metamorphosis15 into a machine, as there’s no residual “luz bone” to provide continuity. Cf. Chisholm. What if the machine was so finely constituted that it had the same persistence conditions as an organism?
Olson thinks that Baker misdescribes her own view, because while she claims to believe that she is an animal, she can’t really believe this as it has unacceptable logical consequences when combined with her other views. That is, you can’t simultaneously hold:-
  1. That you are an animal,
  2. That the persistence conditions of an animal are such that an animal starts off as a fetus and may end up a vegetable, and
  3. That you weren’t a fetus.
Olson presses the point: Baker says that while I’m an animal, I’m not merely an animal. Olson parses that as “x is F, but x is not merely F”. He doesn’t really spell it out (though he does refer to “the second conjunct”), but from the inferences he draws (that if every F is G, then x is G; ie. he has taken it that Fx) it appears that he takes it that “but x is not merely F” should be understood as “and x is H”, so that from (Fx and Hx) we get Fx. The example for F is “a philosopher”; but surely this isn’t a primary kind term, so Baker is bound to object.
  • Just what kind of “is” is involved in the case “x is a philosopher” – not the “is” of identity – but didn’t Jen Hornsby say that all “is”s reflect property-attribution? Look16 this up. Part of the trouble here is that what follows from all this logic depends on whether the property attributed is a primary kind term. If it is, and we have both Fx and Gx, then we have F = G, for instance. That’s why F = “Human Animal” and G = “Person” are problematical. But nothing interesting follows from Olson’s example where G = “Philosopher”.
  • It’s clear (to me) that these objections only work if Baker uses “is” univocally in her sentences “I am an x”. But she doesn’t. When she says “I am an animal” she means “I am constituted by, but not identical to, and animal”. When she says “I am a person”, she means “I am identical to a person” (she probably muddies the waters by saying “I am most fundamentally a person”). Olson does recognise this but doesn’t take it seriously. He says “When Baker says that I am an animal, she means that an animal “constitutes” me.” However, he doesn’t take constitution seriously – he says the details don’t matter – but they do. He parses constitution as saying that I (a person) and an animal (a different thing to me) are co-located. Baker denies this, though whether her account of constitution really allows for this denial is a moot point.
Now Olson gets to the real substance of the matter. He says that Baker doesn’t believe that I have the property of being an animal – because if she did, she would have to admit that I was once a fetus. Instead, she believes that I have the property of being constituted by an animal. And, yes – she does believe that. So, I suspect that all the tedious logical spelling out is a complaint that Baker shouldn’t use “is” equivocally. The equivocation disguises the fact that she doesn’t really believe that she is an animal in the way that Olson believes she is. Olson is of course correct in this analysis.

Olson makes an analogy – which he takes to illustrate the sort of error Baker is making. We might say that (in the Biblical epic) Charlton Heston is Moses – but we wouldn’t thereby by claiming that he really is Moses, only that he’s acting a part. If someone did make the claim that CH really is M, they wouldn’t be in agreement with the normal speaker. The way the analogy is supposed to work is that Olson (but not Baker) is making the claim that Baker really is an animal. Baker is only saying something like that she is playing the role of an animal. I’m not sure that Baker would accept this. Her account of constitution has it that the relationship between the thing constituted (the person) and the thing constituting (the animal) is much closer than this role-play.

Finally, Olson turns his attention to Big Tent Metaphysics (BTM):-
  1. Baker says that “reality and value go together” and that every property that is distinctive (D) or significant (S) determines a natural kind. However, if she just meant “metaphysically D or S”, then she’d be saying something trivial, so just what does she mean? Olson takes it that it’s something D or S to us, and that’s my understanding too. He adds “in any way”, which may be taking things a bit far, though Baker does owe us an account of just how D or S a trait has to be in order to generate a new primary kind. Olson seems to be claiming that for Baker, all D or S properties are essential – and she’d probably agree – but unless she’s to claim that all properties are essential (in which case there could be no persistence through change), she has to give a (non-circular) account of essential properties.
  2. Olson says (rightly) that it is this BTM that leads Baker to claim that we’re not really organisms, just constituted by them. Baker finds the FPP17 S & D. So, anything with a FPP18 is an essential kind. “Person” is shorthand for “thing with a FPP”19, so Persons are an essential kind, and have their defining property – an FPP20 – essentially. Since organisms don’t have FPPs21 essentially, Persons can’t be organisms. So far, so good.
  3. For Baker, the person and the organism are distinct things – numerically different – yet they aren’t separate things. Olson has two problems with this – just what does “separate” mean, and how do I know which I am?
  4. Olson says (rightly) that there are lots of things we are interested in, and picks just the one I think represents an ontological watershed – sentience. Where I am is a sentient being who (or that) isn’t essentially a person as sentient beings don’t necessarily have FPPs22. Amusingly, Olson claims that Baker needs a Big Tent because she has a lot of things to fit into it. I don’t know how Baker answers this question. Presumably she must allow that we have a Sentient and a Person co-located and both constituted by the Human Animal. If her logic of constitution works at all, it won’t have a problem with this as there is still only one thing present – but she might have to change the direction of focus. The one things present is the human Animal, which constitutes both the Sentient and the Person. If we say there is something that is most fundamentally a Sentient, and another thing that is most fundamentally a Person, don’t we have 2 things – but we always seemed to have two things, because we had the thing that is most fundamentally a Human Animal as well as the Person, so maybe it all works out somehow.
  5. Olson now asks why we should accept BTM (note this is independent, I think, of accepting the CV). He gives Baker’s argument … which is really just the assertion that metaphysics isn’t worth doing unless it treats of everything we find significant – ie. that it say something to say about Persons, artefacts and Sentients as such.
    • Note 1: Olson has to deny the existence of artefacts as such (ie. as things over an above the lumps of matter that make them up) because otherwise he ends up with overpopulation just as in the TA argument. Or so it would seem. I need to check23.
    • Note 2: Does Metaphysics really treat all organisms alike? Members of the species Homo Sapiens in general have interesting properties that members of other species don’t, or at least not to the same degree (maybe an important distinction). Is this a metaphysical fact, or something that only biology, or psychology, is interested in? Surely the fact that there is such a thing as (self-) consciousness (or sentience) is a metaphysical fact?
  6. Olson is unmoved. He makes an analogy between Physics and Metaphysics. Physics doesn’t deal with Persons as such – it treats them as lumps of matter – but Physics is worth doing, for all that. I’m not sure I’m moved by that argument, either. The special sciences are agreed to be a partial view (except by reductionists, who would claim that everything is really just matter in motion, and that physics misses nothing out). However, metaphysics is supposed to deal with everything that exists. I suppose it can’t just leave things out – if it doesn’t want to include them, it must deny that they exist. That’s just what Olson does – he does deny that persons exist – but only if they are thought of as anything other than animals with peculiar properties.
  7. Olson ends by rejecting the claim that there is something about metaphysics that requires it to capture all the categories that are important outside of metaphysics, because he doesn’t know what that something is.

Reply to "Markosian (Ned) - Three Problems for Olson's Account of Personal Identity"

This is a review of that part of "Olson (Eric) - Replies to Baker, Markosian & Zimmerman" (where Olson replies to his critics, Baker24, Markosian25 and Zimmerman26) that deals with his response to "Markosian (Ned) - Three Problems for Olson's Account of Personal Identity".

Olson thinks that Markosian makes three objections:-
  1. Markosian claims that you can have numerical identity27 between people who aren’t the same person. Olson also thinks that, conversely, Markosian could claim that we could have the same two numerically different people who are the same person.
  2. Markosian thinks that Olson is committed to saying that, in the Salamander TE, the two people Ned and Lucy are the same person.
  3. Markosian claims that we can become corpses, which Olson denies.
Olson’s responses are as follows:-
  1. Olson doesn’t think that he and Markosian are in competition. Olson was talking about identity-preserving relations, and Markosian thinks this leaves something important out of the topic of personal identity.
  2. Olson denies this claim. He admits that he might be committed to saying that Ned and Lucy are numerically identical. However, he’s doubtful, because he’s not sure the TE is possible. However, his account of identity have nothing to say on the matter of whether they are the same person, in Markosian’s sense of the relation. While Ned and Lucy are (for the sake of argument) the same human being, that doesn’t mean they have to be the same person, in Markosian’s sense. He neither endorses nor denies what Markosian calls Bio-EPPI.
  3. Olson claims that “death is the end of us”, but adds the rider “religious beliefs aside”. Markosian claims that we continue to exist as a mummy. Since he agrees with Olson that we are animals, this just implies that he and Olson disagree on what it takes for an animal to persist. While Markosian doesn’t explain what it is for an animal to persist, he disagrees with Olson’s account.
My comments are as follows:-
  1. Nothing ontological is left out for Markosian; at least I don’t think so. Hence, Markosian’s position differs radically from Baker’s.
  2. Markosian hasn’t made clear just what his “same person” relation is. Just what are the persistence conditions of persons, for him?
  3. This receives further comment from Olson below. For now, I just wonder what scope Olson allows for religious beliefs. Can these be evaluated?
Olson devotes the remainder of his response to expanding on Markosian’s third objection:-
  1. He notes that many critics of "Olson (Eric) - The Human Animal - Personal Identity Without Psychology" have accepted that we are animals, that psychology has nothing to do with our identity-conditions, yet have balked at Olson’s account of animal identity. While he hasn’t seen a better account, he would view one as a friendly improvement on his own theory.
  2. The reason he thinks animals cease to exist when they die is that the PCs of corpses are radically different from those of animals.
  3. Olson even seems to doubt the existence of corpses. Why is this? Is that because he’s worried by the “corpse to be” problem, where we would have too many thinkers?
  4. What would the PCs of corpses be? Similar to other inanimate things – such as statues, if there are such things! He considers some possibilities. Retention of shape; the bulk of atoms; gradual change.
  5. What it takes for a living organism to persist is entirely different. There are radical changes of shape from embryo to adult. The adult can survive losses of arms and legs. It might even survive paring down to a head on life-support. It survives because its biological life continues.
  6. Consequently, because the PCs of organism and corpse are so different, he can think of no (disjunctive?) account that covers both. But if there is one, he’d welcome it.
  7. He covers these matters further in "Olson (Eric) - Animalism and the Corpse Problem".
My comments (not indexed to those above) are as follows:-
  1. I think such as Fred Feldman (in "Feldman (Fred) - Confrontations with the Reaper: A Philosophical Study of the Nature and Value of Death") adopt the position that we persist as corpses. His analogy is with someone’s butterfly collection. But surely, there’s a distinction between a butterfly collection (of butterflies flapping about) and a butterfly-corpse collection. It’s just that butterflies live such transitory lives – and batter themselves to bits so quickly – that we, as collectors, focus on their post-mortem state. If I had a bird collection, one would assume they were alive.
  2. We need to define just what “life” is; try "Wollheim (Richard) - Living" or maybe "Wilson (Jack) - Biological Individuality - The identity and Persistence of Living Entities".
  3. I generally agree with Olson on this point, but doesn’t he give too much away by allowing that a head on life-support is an organism. Didn’t he deny this in his book? Or maybe just other animalists do – eg. "Mackie (David) - Going Topless"? Olson certainly claims that the brain is “just another organ”, so why favour the head? Maybe it’s cerebrums that he’s suspicious of? A head contains so much of the command and control structure of the animal (not just the psychology) that he might agree that the head is an almost maximally pared-down organism. But then he’d need to define just what an organism has to be able to do in order to remain an organism. We need a principled reason why – if heads are animals – why cerebrums, whole brains, or whatever is sufficient to maintain a FPP28 are not animals. Maybe Olson doesn’t care if it happens that the animal persists if the FPP29 persists, he’s happy. All he doesn’t want is that the failure of the FPP30 leads to the failure of us to persist, because a FPP31 isn’t a necessary property of an animal.

Reply to "Zimmerman (Dean) - Problems for Animalism"

This is a review of that part of "Olson (Eric) - Replies to Baker, Markosian & Zimmerman" (where Olson replies to his critics, Baker32, Markosian33 and Zimmerman34) that deals with his response to "Zimmerman (Dean) - Problems for Animalism".

Olson “agrees with nearly everything Zimmerman says” (which probably explains why he doesn’t engage with the detail) and thinks that he has provided two serious objections to the view that we animals. I’d thought that Zimmerman had provided three problems, but I think Olson, and maybe Zimmerman, considers the first problem to break down into two parts.
  1. The first problem – which Zimmerman covers in the first two sections of his paper – Olson calls The Rival Candidates Problem. The reason it is a single argument is that Olson can get out of the first part by denying the existence of various common-sense objects; but then he’s caught by the point that if he does this, how does he know that animals exist?
  2. The second problem – covered in the third section of Zimmerman’s paper – Olson calls The Vagueness Problem.
The details go as follows:-


The Rival Candidates (RC) Problem

The reason Olson thinks he’s a human animal is that there’s a human animal right where he is, and it’s thinking – and he doesn’t want more than one thinker for metaphysical and epistemological reasons. But what if there are other candidate-thinkers. Zimmerman had mentioned “mere hunks of matter” and “mere bodies” (whatever they are) as well as psychological continuants. He might also have mentioned heads and brains. If these exist, it looks like they can think just like an animal can. Why am I not one of these, and how would I know which I was. Olson has about 5 alternatives:-
  1. He can deny that the rivals think, and explain why.
  2. He can accept they exist and think, but explain how he knows he’s not one of them.
  3. He can deny their existence.
  4. He can combine these options, saying different things about different candidates.
  5. He can endorse relative identity.
He rules out the 5th option, and doesn’t discuss the 4th (disjunctive) account. He doesn’t like any of the other three either, but prefers the 1st. I note that (2) would only solve the epistemological, not the metaphysical (overpopulation) problem.

The RC problem worries him much more than the usual objections to animalism, such as:-
  1. Thought Experiments: animalism runs into trouble from brain transplants or robotic replacements.
  2. Moral Objections: that animalism implies that we are only temporarily and contingently people (ie. persons).
He first tries a damage-limitation exercise; the RC problem afflicts any candidate account of PI, so the problem isn’t exclusive to him – it just threatens his claim that his solution is the best. He also has his usual swipe at Baker, saying that she has the same problem, despite the fact that she repeatedly claims that the CV can account for Olson’s epistemological and metaphysical worries (claims that, while contentious, deserve consideration).

I think we need to remember the context of all this – Zimmerman’s paper is against Olson’s Master Argument for animalism, not against animalism as such (though no doubt he’s against that as well). So, Olson might be able to remain an animalist if he found a better argument. I need to do likewise35. It is a really awkward problem, because of the “all or nothing” logic of identity36. Something like Baker’s CV (though not her ontological pretensions for persons), in which we can circumvent the double-counting and epistemological problems, has to be along the right lines.

But Olson does take the problem seriously. If all these candidates really existed, all psychologically indistinguishable, and without my being able to know which I was – then we have a mess in which it is indeterminate or unknowable:-
  • What I am37,
  • How big I am,
  • What it takes for me to persist (including what are the correct answers to the sci-fi TEs),
  • Whether I was human-shaped a month ago, or a scattered cloud of particles.
Olson is inclined to adopt a sparse-ontology approach – in which there are only particles and organisms – so he denies the existence of the RCs. This really would solve the problem, but Olson agrees with Zimmerman that he needs a principled reason for believing in the existence of animals while denying the existence of the RCs – or indeed for believing in any composite things.

Olson thinks he has a principled reason for believing the only candidate for being him is an animal. He is influenced by "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Material Beings". He considers Van Inwagen’s Special Composition Question - which asks when a mereological sum forms another thing. He rejects both of these, as he expects most of his readers will do likewise. Instead he wants some middle ground, where there are some composite objects, but not just any old gerrymandered ones. The composite object needs to be unified in some way. The hard question is what this unity is.

He thinks the most plausible candidates for composite objects are animals. His choice seems to come down to personal confidence (presumably38 justified elsewhere). He’s sure animals exist – because “the particles that make up a cat are unified if any particles are” – but not so sure about the other RCs. He just blusters – saying there are lots of reasons for thinking ourselves animals, and none for thinking ourselves the other RCs – except maybe mereological simples (Chisholm’s view?). He claims it’s an answer to the problem, if not a very good one. I don’t, though, think he really engages with Zimmerman’s concerns.


The Vagueness Problem

Olson parses Zimmerman’s argument as follows (though not in numbered bullets – this is my explication):-
  1. Animals have vague boundaries,
  2. So, there are vastly more animal-shaped hunks of matter than there are animals
  3. These hunks are the only candidates for “us”
  4. Each hunk is conscious if any hunk is
  5. They can’t all be conscious
  6. So, no material things are conscious
  7. We are conscious,
  8. So, we are not material things
  9. Animals are material things
  10. So, we are not animals.
All this is a bit quick, and it’s not clear what the suppressed premises are (presumably these are premises Olson, rather than Zimmerman, is committed to).

Anyway, Olson finds this a troubling objection, though he doubts (5) – which was Zimmerman’s premise (4) – if the hunks really exist, then Olson believes that they would think. Hence, he denies (2) – there are no hunks of matter in Olson’s view.

Olson’s positive view (for which we are referred to Section 17 of "Van Inwagen (Peter) - Material Beings" – ie. "Van Inwagen (Peter) - The Problem of the Many and the Vagueness of Composition") is that there is just one animal-candidate present. It has fuzzy boundaries – atoms on the periphery are neither definitely parts of it nor definitely not. He admits that this position – and that of the sparse ontology of material objects that he also espouses – is unfashionable. But the vagueness objection is hard to answer and he can’t think of a better answer. He also thinks that any answer to the question what we are39 suffers from the vagueness problem; the exception being the answer that we are mereological simples (presumably immaterial ones) – but this view has problems of its own which Olson doesn’t elaborate on here. I think the claim that animalism suffers from the vagueness problem no worse than the alternative accounts deserves some elaboration. How does Baker treat of vagueness on the CV? Also, as previously noted, I’d thought that Chisholm was positing a materialist40 mereological simple view of personal identity.

In-Page Footnotes

Footnote 1:
  • This is the write-up as it was when this Abstract was last output, with text as at the timestamp indicated (19/07/2026 17:52:48).
  • Link to Latest Write-Up Note.

Text Colour Conventions (see disclaimer)

  1. Blue: Text by me; © Theo Todman, 2026


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