Persistence Narrativism and the Determinacy of Personal Identity
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Persistence Narrativism and the Determinacy of Personal Identity Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera 1 Received: 20 April 2020 / Revised: 17 July 2020 / Accepted: 1 September 2020 # Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract We have a strong intuition that personal identity is a determinate relationship. Parfit famously challenged this intuition. In this paper I explain how narrative identity theories can face that challenge and defend that personal identity is determinate thanks to what I call the social narrativity thesis. This move will raise some concerns regarding the also strong intuition that personal identity is what matters when we care about our future existence. I address this concern to show that narrative identity theories can account for both intuitions at the same time. Keywords Personal identity . Persistence problem . Narrativity . Schechtman .
Conventionalism
1 Introduction One of the most pervasive intuitions about personal identity is that it is a determinate relationship. I.e. that it is an all-or-nothing issue and so there must always be a yes-or-no answer to questions about our persistence. For example, when we think about the future, we either think that we will still exist, or that we will not. The idea that we could “more or less exist”, or “half-exist”, seems strange, and even difficult to understand unless it is taken in a metaphorical sense. This intuition is usually accompanied by another one that is equally difficult to dismiss: that personal identity is what matters in survival. Again, when we think about the future, our concern is whether we ourselves will still exist. That is, if there will be some future person that will be identical to us. If someone told us that we will not exist in the future, but that we do not have anything to worry about, we will probably yell at him, and ask him to take our concern seriously.
* Alfonso Muñoz-Corcuera [email protected]
1
Complutense University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Philosophia
In his widely influential Reasons and Persons, Parfit famously challenged both intuitions (Parfit, 1984, pp. 216–217). He claimed that, unless we endorse the view that we are separately existing entities, distinct from our brains and bodies and our experiences, then there are situations (e.g. cases in which a person splits into two, or two persons merge into one) in which it is impossible to give a yes-or-no answer to questions about our persistence.1 Moreover, he claimed that this should not trouble us, because personal identity is not what matters to us when we care about our survival. What really matters is psychological continuity, and if there is a future person who is psychologically continuous with us, the question of whether that person will also be identical to us is of secondary importance. The first proponents of narrative identity theories presented their views as an alternative to Parfit’s counterintuitive conclusion (see e.g. Ricoeur, 1994, pp. 129– 130; Schechtman, 1996, pp. 60–66). However, narrativists mostly focused on the intuition that personal id
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