Non-branching Clause

Abstract

The central claim of the Parfitian psychological approach to personal identity is that the fact about personal identity is underpinned by a "non-branching" psychological continuity relation. Hence, for the advocates of the Parfitian view, it is important to understand what it is for a relation to take or not take a branching form. Nonetheless, very few attempts have been made in the literature of personal identity to define the "non-branching clause." This paper undertakes this task. Drawing upon a recent debate between Anthony Brueckner and Harold Noonan on the issue, I present three candidates for the non-branching clause.The psychological approach to personal identity holds that a person existing at one time is identical to a person existing at another time just in case they stand in a certain appropriate psychological relation. One problem of this approach is that in a typical case of fission, a pre-fission subject seems to stand in a perfectly appropriate psychological relation to both post-fission offshoots; but, of course, she cannot be identical to both. As a champion of the psychological approach, Derek Parfit has responded to this problem by arguing that the fact about personal identity consists in the holding of a psychological relation that does not take a "branching" form (1984: 262-63). On this view, the prefission subject is not identical to either offshoot because the psychological relation holding between them does take a branching form.For those who follow Parfit on this solution, then, it is pressing to accomplish two tasks: (1) clarify the psychological relation that underlies personal identity and (2) define what it is for that relation to take a non-branching form. Parfit has already done successful work for the first task. He calls the desired psychological relation

Non-branching personal persistence

“…In the rare cases where phenomenal connections really are structured in The Senile General pattern, it seems, I think, that the result of (11) is plausible (that is, the result that The Boy, The Officer, and The General are all I-unrelated to each other), for in that case the stream of consciousness of The Boy would split into two: one stream including the experiences of The Officer but not those of The General and one stream including the experiences of The General but not those of The Officer. 39 Yi (2010Yi ( , p. 200, 2013). Yi discusses a case similar to My Forgetful Fission with a psychological kind of connectedness (it's unclear whether Young Wholly is C 0 -related to Lefty in his case) where Young Wholly is scanned at t 1 and Righty is a replica created from this scan at t 3 .…”