The Extreme Claim, Psychological Continuity and the Person Life View

Abstract

Marya Schechtman has raised a series of worries for the Psychological Continuity Theory of personal identity (PCT) stemming from what Derek Parfit called the 'Extreme Claim'. This is roughly the claim that theories like it are unable to explain the importance we attach to personal identity. In her recent Staying Alive (2014), she presents further arguments related to this and sets out a new narrative theory, the Person Life View (PLV), which she sees as solving the problems as well as bringing other advantages over the PCT. I look over some of her earlier arguments and responses to them as a way in to the new issues and theory. I will argue that the problems for the PCT and advantages that the PLV brings are all merely apparent, and present no reason for giving up the former for the latter.The PCT, the Extreme Claim and Schechtman's earlier criticisms Parfit's description of the PCT's account of personal identity will provide a good starting point. Psychological continuity is the holding of overlapping chains of strong connectedness…For X and Y to be the same person, there must be over every day enough direct psychological connections (Parfit 1984: p. 206, emphasis in the original). The connections to which he refers are links of memory (or, rather, apparent memory), continuing beliefs, desires, intentions, emotional attitudes, character dispositions, and so on. The view does not require such direct links over a whole life-they may in many cases be only short-term; it is the continuity that overlapping links provide that constitutes someone's persistence.The PCT account of identity forefronts our agency. By highlighting sophisticated psychological attitudes like intentions and second-order desires as well as memories, it aims to provide an account of the persistence of things which are capable of agency and which are appropriate as the subjects of judgments of responsibility and attitudes of selfconcern. Schechtman characterises the core of the view as follows:

Technological Fictions and Personal Identity: On Ricoeur, Schechtman and Analytic Thought Experiments

“…I have gestured at that story here, and do so in more detail inBeck (2015).http://repository.uwc.ac.za…”

Technological Fictions and Personal Identity: On Ricoeur, Schechtman and Analytic Thought Experiments

“…More needs to be said about what would make its criterion of identity sufficient. I make a suggestion inBeck (2015). There are other ways available as well, such as Daniel Kolak's arguments that fission does not destroy identity(Kolak, 2008).…”