Theo Todman's Web Page - Notes Pages

Personal Identity

What are We?

(Text as at 18/12/2010 19:58:05)

*** THIS IS NOT THE LATEST VERSION OF THIS NOTE ***

For the present, I just mention that I need to distinguish, as candidates for what we are, (human-) animals¹, organisms², persons³, bodies⁴, beings⁵ and brains⁶. Additionally, I need to treat of selves⁷ and maybe contrast terms like “mensch” (Wikipedia: Mensch) with “person”.

We: the use of the plural is significant. However, the determination of “we” as “the sort of entity likely to be reading this paper” isn’t quite right, even though Dennett and others use similar expressions. Read the first parts of "Brandom (Robert) - Toward a Normative Pragmatics" in "Brandom (Robert) - Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing & Discursive Commitment" for inspiration on “We”.

Intelligibility: this is a reciprocal relationship. We find others (of “our” sort) intelligible, and it is important that they find us intelligible in return. Does this thereby make R = “finds intelligible” an equivalence relation, dividing the world into equivalence classes of mutually intelligible individuals, or does R come in degrees and fall prey to Sorites paradoxes?

For an essay on this topic, follow this link⁸.

This is mainly a place-holder⁹. Currently, just see the categorised reading-list.