Proper Names, Rigidity, and Empirical Studies on Judgments of Identity Across Transformations

Abstract

The question of transtemporal identity of objects in general and persons in particular is an important issue in both philosophy and psychology. While the focus of philosophers traditionally was on questions of the nature of identity relation and criteria that allow to settle ontological issues about identity, psychologists are mostly concerned with how people think about identity, and how they track identity of objects and people through time. In this article, we critically engage with widespread use of inferring folk judgments of identity from study participants' use of proper names in response to experimental vignettes. We provide reasons to doubt that using this method one can reliably infer judgments of numerical identity over time and transformations. We also critically examine allegedly-Kripkean justification of this method and find it lacking. Merely assuming that names are rigid designators will not help. A study participant's use of proper names can be taken to track the participant's identity judgments only if supported by the participant's belief that names used in the scenario are used rigidly.

Experimental philosophy of memory

“…In this context, the question at issue is most often whether the folk apply the memory criterion of personal identity-that is, whether they think that continuity of memory is what allows a person to persist though time-or whether they instead employ some other criterion, such as bodily continuity or continuity of moral character (Nichols & Bruno, 2010;Strohminger & Nichols, 2014;Tierney, Howard, Kumar, Kvaran, & Nichols, 2014;Berniūnas & Dranseika, 2016;Woike, Collard, & Hood, 2020). The experimental philosophy literature on personal identity tends to provide study participants with stories of people undergoing various types of transformation (Dranseika, Dagys, & Berniūnas, 2020) in an attempt to ascertain the criteria on which people rely in deciding whether the post-transformation individual is 'the same person as' the pre-transformation individual. Interestingly, while continuity of memory does indeed seem to matter for folk judgements of personal identity over time, continuity of moral character appears to matter more.…”

Putting your money where your self is: Connecting dimensions of closeness and theories of personal identity

“…Still, O cannot be numerically identical with both A and B, as A and B are not the same person and this would violate transitivity [6,10,17,27,32,33] (as Locke [9] explained, "one thing cannot have two beginnings of metaphysical approaches to identity could be reflected by the choice of different metrics. Closeness can come in degrees and therefore should not be conflated with numerical identity [5,16,37,38]. While continuers are compared on a single dimension, Nozick conceives of this as a weighted additive model derived from multiple dimensions [17].…”