Discontinuity and Identity

Discontinuity and IdentityAuthor(s): Andrew BrennanSource: Noûs, Vol. 21, No. 2 (Jun., 1987), pp. 241-260Published by: WileyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214917 .

Accessed: 14/06/2014 04:54

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Wiley is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Noûs.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 195.78.108.40 on Sat, 14 Jun 2014 04:54:16 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2214917?origin=JSTOR-pdf

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


Discontinuity and Identity

ANDREW BRENNAN

UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING

I. BACKGROUND

This paper is the result of an investigation into the nature of conscious experience. Suppose we agree that some of a person's conscious experiences are discrete from, and discontinuous with, each other: then we can ask just what makes a sequence of such discrete episodes all episodes in the life of one person. As I have argued elsewhere, there are three conditions which are necessary and sufficient for allocating a discrete series of conscious episodes to one and the same person. Interestingly, the results obtained by using these conditions are rather different from the kind of things said by continuity theories of personal identity. For example, I have tried to show that in the case of certain kinds of amnesia, psychological continuity is no guarantee of the kind of unitary and connected experience enjoyed by those whose memory capacities are intact. Moreover, what is sometimes called 'continuity' is not obviously continuity at all. For example, Derek Parfit writes:

Suppose I am about to die. Some future person who will not be me will be fully continuous with me ... He will thus take up my life where I left off, finishing my masterpiece and caring for my children. '

This notion of continuity does not require co-consciousness or psychological connectedness from one moment to another.2 I will be saying something more about this notion of continuity shortly, but for the moment we should note that in Parfit's sense of the term a healthy person's 'continuity' of consciousness involves episodes

NOUS 21 (1987): 241-260 ?1987 by Nou's Publications

241



242 NOUS

that are discontinuous and remote in time from each other. The three conditions I propose allow us to admit that consciousness is an episodic phenomenon without thereby being driven into accep- ting a criterion for personal identity based on bodily continuity.

To see why it is important to have conditions that deal with states of consciousness in this way it is helpful to compare the two cases of amnesia and branching.

c c

t2 --- l

b

b,

'Fa 1 a

Figure 1

In Figure 1 the labels a, b and c pick out extended phases of consciousness,. The diagram is a psychological one, and in the left hand case b is a phase which is psychologically connected to a in a straightforward way (for example by memory). But, due to an un- fortunate cranial infection afflicting the subject of these psychological episodes the c-phase has no direct psychological access through memory or anything else to the b-phase. However, c does have direct access to the a-phase. The a-phase, then, is directly tied by psychological relations to both the b- and c-phases: while c's linkage to b seems at best an indirect one mediated by a.

Given that a, b and c are all tied to one and the same body, our natural response to this kind of case is to allocate all the phases to the history of one person who, subsequent to t2 has an amnesia with regard to the b-phase. But if we try to dispense with the body criterion-something that is attractive to neo-Lockeans, and to those



DISCONTINUITY 243

who take the view that persons are software of a kind-we will find it hard to distinguish this case of amnesia from the case of branching depicted on the right hand side of the figure.

Briefly, in a case of branching, or fission, we have to imagine that just before t1 both halves of the subject's brain are brought into the same informational state. Subsequently, one hemisphere is removed and placed in a new body. The other hemisphere remains in the original body which is, let us suppose, afflicted with a terminal illness. The psychological history of this hemisphere is represented by the branching line b in the diagram, while that of the transplanted hemisphere is represented by segment c. This time, phases a and b are shared by a continuous body, while c takes place in a different body; but - psychologically speaking - the situation seems to be no different from that in the amnesia case. In each case, b's connection to c can only be traced through a; and the c-phase takes place as if there had been no b-phase at all.3 But surely this collapse of the two cases into one is quite wrong, even when we view the matter purely in psychological terms. Can the neo- Lockean keep the cases apart without the need to resort to a body criterion?4 The three conditions for identity proposed later in the paper resolve the problem here, for they reveal that even viewed purely in psychological terms the cases of amnesia and of branching are quite different.

With such useful conditions as these to hand, the prospect arises of applying them outside the domain of the psychological. Every- day life yields many instances of episodic phenomena, as we will shortly see. Of course, in the case of everyday physical objects, the things often called concrete continuants, we do seem to find a clear case of objects whose histories exhibit very clear spatiotemporal continuity. And certainly for such objects there seems to be no need to invoke identity conditions of the kind required for episodic things. Perhaps not. But a certain thought experiment might be extremely valuable in testing the conditions I propose for the psychological case. Suppose we imagine that everyday concrete objects have a spatiotemporally discontinuous existence. If the proposed conditions yield intuitively satisfactory results in this bizarre situation, then they will deserve additional confidence when applied to the case of genuinely episodic things. The conditions will, indeed, have re- ceived independent corroboration thanks to our thought experiment. On the other hand, if the conditions fail to do justice to our intui- tions in the imagined case, then we can take them as being falsified unless there is some important distinction between the physical and the mental that has been overlooked. The thought experiment has an added value as well. For it may be that examining a new range



244 NOUS

of cases yields further insights into the working of our conditions, and in turn suggests yet further applications of them.

A word of caution, however, is necessary before proceeding with the enterprise. In looking at significantly unusual cases we stray away from conceptual analysis and move towards what might be called conceptual development. Now, it may be that analytical philosophers practice conceptual development more often than is usually admitted. Given the indeterminancy, and vagueness, in our concept of a person, for example, what is meant to be an analytical study of personal identity may end up proposing one particular development of the concept over various rivals. In this case, the competing conceptions of personhood have failed to uncover one agreed core of doctrines for the very good reason that there may be no such core.5 Applying this thought to the case in hand, it is necessary to realise that I shall be arguing for a particular development of the concept of physical object in the face of the imagined oddities. So any confirmation for my proposed conditions is itself conditional upon acceptance of the plausibility of the conceptual development envisaged in what follows.

II. THE PROBLEM

'A single object', wrote Hume, 'plac'd before us and survey'd for any time without our discovering in it any interruption or variation, is able to give us a notion of identity' (Treatise, I, iv, 2). Such a claim might fit well with the notion that the furniture of the world consists of concrete objects displaying spatiotemporal and qualitative continuity. It is hardly surprising, then, that a recent writer on the topic should say:

... there is the most intimate connection between our concept of the identity of a specified sort of body and the idea of a spatiotemporally and qualitatively continuous succession of body-stages of that sort.6

But what if-astonishingly-a new finding were to suggest the existence of a gap between our concept of identity and the way objects 'really' are, a gap associated, ironically enough, with a certain gappiness in objects themselves? Among macroscopic phenomena, there seem to be few examples of concrete, but discontinuous, objects. Admittedly, pains and certain other 'inner' states, letters (that is, epistles), plays, television serials and the like apparently exhibit identity along with spatiotemporal discontinuity. Yet none of these items is concrete, and the periodic nature of such astronomical curiosities as pulsars, variable stars or transients is thought to result from the vagaries of observation. Thus, for example, a star in a



DISCONTINUITY 245

binary system may appear to wink off at regular intervals, but only because the earth lies on the plane of the orbit of the two bodies, so that the invisible partner eclipses the other from our point of view. So let us then resort to fantasy. A series of studies involving high-speed photography and so on has been carried out in order to check for brief discontinuities in ordinary objects. Amazingly, one of the hills adjacent to the Stirling campus has been established to 'flicker' occasionally. The hill (called 'Dumyat' incidentally) runs steadily, so to speak, for 167 hours, winks off for approximately 1/1000 of a second, runs for a further 36 hours, winks off briefly again, returns to the 167 hour cycle, winks off again, and so on. Many simple tests, let us further suppose, have established that the hill is not simply invisible during these brief flickers. Projectiles, for example, can pass through the place normally occupied by the hill provided they traverse it in the requisite 1/1000 of a second; otherwise, of course, they become lodged deep in its interior. So there are times when the hill, however briefly, is just not there at all. Walkers, and the rest of us, however, are quite unaware of these changes, even though it means that on some occasions I may have been standing unsupported for those brief instants many hundreds of metres above the nearest solid ground!

We may suppose that only a few such gappy objects have been found. The discovery suggests, though, that for all we know every physical thing is subject to regular even if brief discontinuities. Un- fortunately, one very natural view about identity seems no match for such a possibility.

III. SPATIOTEMPORAL CONTINUITY

Whatever else is true of the Dumyat case, our experiments have revealed the existence of a number of objects successively inhabiting the location of Dumyat. Diagrammatically, the situation is like this:

t

i D4

D

__ __ _ __ _ __ _ ___Figure P

Figure 2



246 NOUS

Our problem is to relate our beliefs about Dumyat to the succession D1, D2, D3, . . ., Dn. Were we dealing with a person rather than with a hill, one tempting suggestion would be that each Di is an embodiment of Dumyat. But it is not easy to see how to separate hills and their physical stuff in the way that some would say persons are distinct from their physical stuff. The trouble is that hills do not seem to have appropriate high-level properties, for example, memories, intentions, beliefs and ambitions. For a person to survive a change of body we might look for persistence of such high- level properties. And of course replacement of a person's body by another exactly similar body is indeed a change of body. The Dumyat case is thus like a change of body without persistence of the mind.

A better option, perhaps, is to claim that each Di is an extended stage of some same object in just the way that momentary stages of objects are stages of objects. But of what kind of object are we thinking? If we stick with the notion that our hill is a concrete continuant, then-unlike the usual situation in such cases-it fails to exhibit continuity among its stages. So have we here some special sort of continuity-continuity that allows little gaps?

Such a suggestion is not as odd as we might at first think. As Hirsch, for one, points out, our ordinary notion of identity for concrete objects is compatible with both qualitative and spatiotemporal discontinuities among their stages. Consider, for example, lopping a large branch off a tree. With the last stroke of the saw the branch falls and the tree's shape and volume exhibit not a gradual change but a 'jump' to a new shape and volume (see Hirsch, op. cit., p. 12). Likewise, if the place of an object at some time is the region of space coinciding with the object at that time, we can say that places overlap if they have a part in common. Now one notion of continuous spatiotemporal change is that if we take successive times t and t' at both of which an object exists, then we can make the extent of overlap between the places of the object at t and at t' as great as we like by taking t' suitably close to t.7 Now, in this strong sense, the tree's loss of a branch in the way described does not ex- emplify spatiotemporal continuity.

For any plausible form of continuity we require some (sufficiently great) overlap between the successive places occupied by the same object. If there were no such overlap, then it would be hard to see just what was meant by calling the history of such an item 'continuous'. Hirsch suggests that a plausible notion of continuity would require that the extent of overlap between the successive places an object occupies will always be greater than the extent of nonoverlap. This requires that in changing from moment to moment an object



DISCONTINUITY 247

should keep most of its material, and hence rules out the possibility that a three stage rocket may retain its identity upon shedding its first stage if that stage represents more than fifty per cent of the rocket's total volume. Clearly, there are interesting issues here that could be argued over. And I would personally want to allow a far weaker continuity condition than the one proposed. But the details of this condition need not detain us at the moment. For not even the weakest of continuities is exhibited in the Dumyat case.

There is in fact no overlap between the place occupied by any Di just before a gap and the place of its successor in the very next 1/1000 of a second. For it has no successor then, and coincides with no place at all in that interval. As a desperate remedy, perhaps we should allow the temporal jump, taking it as no more than a special case of the partial discontinuities already discussed. But this looks most odd-as if we are trying to allow discontinuity as a special case of continuity. Some of the oddness of this course of action is perhaps reduced if we note an ambiguity in the notion of continuity itself. For although Hirsch's conception is entirely natural if we are thinking in terms of a continuous path traced by an item through spacetime, not everyone seems to have just this notion in mind when they use the term 'continuity.' Consider, for example, Parfit's, Lewis's and others' accounts of psychological continuity.8 None of these authors is unaware of the episodic nature of consciousness. Rather, what they mean by 'psychological continuity', I would guess, is that each new mental episode goes on where its predecessor left off, whether or not any temporal gap separates the episodes in question. Nozick's closest continuer account, likewise, would seem to allow that each Di is continued in, or by, the succeeding Di + 1.9 I do not intend to follow these authors in using the term in such an extended way. Rather, I will restrict the notion of continuity to what seems to be a perfectly natural conception according to which stages are continuous with each other when they are locatable on an uninterrupted path tracable through space and time. Using this very notion, then, it is clear that the Dumyat example is not a case of some rather weak continuity; rather, it is a case of something entirely different.

IV. EPISODIC OBJECTS

Perhaps we should consider assigning each Di to Dumyat in much the way that each instalment of The Archers can be assigned to one and the same radio series. (The Archers is a long running British radio soap opera). We have already noted that many sorts of episodic objects seem to be nonconcrete. But it would be simply question-



248 NOUS

begging to move from this observation to the conclusion that any discontinuous thing must be nonconcrete. So just what is the relation betwen discontinuity and concreteness?

One consideration that will not be of much help here involves an appeal to what we might call functional discontinuity. Artefacts, for example, are frequently designed in a way that permits disassembly for cleaning, repair, storage or whatever, and the degree of disassembly may be so great in some cases that we might think the object goes out of existence. Hirsch, and Nozick too, both find it natural to regard an item that is taken. apart for repairs as going out of existence for a while and then coming back into existence upon reassembly. Of course, certain conditions have to be met in order for the newly assembled item to be regarded by these writers as the numerically same item as the one previously disassembled. One such condition, drawn from what Quinton would call 'compositional theories', might be that the item in question should contain the majority of the same components in much the same ar- rangement as in the original.10 Another condition might be that some same sortal be true of both original and reassembled items.

Leaving the matter of sortals aside for the moment, it should be clear that the compositional criterion is of no help to us in the present case. Suppose, at least for the sake of the argument, that a watch taken apart for repairs does go out of existence for a time. There is no suggestion that its parts could in turn undergo similar disassembly, and the components thus revealed undergo further disassembly, . . . and so on. For if such a process were carried on long enough we would have no components upon which a compositional criterion could plausibly operate. Molecules, probably, and atoms certainly would not yield identity conditions of the sort needed by the compositional theorist. We can see this by reflecting upon the fact that the information that some object contains just the same atoms as some original object would not incline us, in the absence of other considerations, to count the two objects as the same. The compositionalist wishes to allow discontinuity of the watch along with continuity of its parts. So the identity of the parts themselves- or of a fairly significant proportion of them-is required to underpin the later identification of the repaired watch as the same as the original. Such an identity of components is just what we do not have in the hill case. Each Di, of course, has much the same structure as its immediate predecessor (with due allowance for erosion, quarrying and landslip). But whether the parts participating in the structure of a given Di are the same as those in its immediate predecessor or successor is something that the hill's discontinuity



DISCONTINUITY 249

prevents us from deciding. So even the compositional theorist can- not come to our help here, and we are still faced with the problem of -the relation between spatiotemporal continuity and concreteness.

V. SCATTERED OBJECTS

So let us return to the conception of each Di as an extended Dumyat- stage and think about the relation of momentary stages to the larger concrete continuants of which they are stages. In Quine's familiar example, each momentary stage of the Cayster is a concrete object, while the river itself is also 'a single concrete object extended in space and time'." On this account, momentary stages are parts of continuants. Indeed, a concrete continuant will typically have two kinds of parts. One sort are themselves extended objects worming their way through space and time, like the frame, wheels, pedals and handlebars of a bicycle which aggregate together into a whole, continuous (we think!) bicycle. But time-slices of an object are also parts of it, aggregating together in their own distinctive way to form a continuous four-dimensional object.

If a momentary stage of an object is part of it, so too-on this conception-is a longer stage. Viewed in this way an object is (im- properly) a part of itself. Moreover, there will be objects-an abun- dance of them-manifesting spatiotemporal discontinuity; it just happens that we, with our limited resources, lack the terminology, time or patience for singling out such items. Thus Goodman deals with possible entities by speaking not of new, non-actual entities, but by speaking instead about actual, scattered, entities. The sum individual, he tells us, consisting of place p and time t (where p is a phenomenal visual field place not presented at t) 'misses being a place-time much as the scattered whole comprised of the body of one automobile and the chassis of another across the street misses being an automobile'.12 So it looks as though a mereological stance like this can provide us with a way of saving the concreteness of an object while recognising its discontinuity. Let us go along the mereological path for a while to see if a solution is genuinely in prospect. All that we have established at the moment is that the various Dumyat-stages can be summed to make a single scattered object, just as any other scattering of items can be said to constitute a mereological whole. But this in no way assures us that the mereological whole in question is really a hill. Perhaps the whole misses being a hill in the way that Goodman's scattered car components miss being a car. So we need to establish just what considerations would lead us to count a scattered whole as constituting an object belonging to some natural, artefactual, or other kind.



250 NOUS

A comparison between the Dumyat case and a different form of discontinuity might help suggest an answer here. The following figure shows the history of a number of Dumyat-stages, whale-stages and iceberg-stages:

t

I3 W 3 D3

t2_____________P

W 2 D2 I2

Di II WI

P

pi P2 P3

Figure 3

II, I2 and I3 are extended iceberg-stages which, let us suppose, we would unhesitatingly allocate to the same iceberg if they showed spatiotemporal continuity; and likewise for the whale-stages WI, W2 and W3. The gaps after t1 and t2 are meant to be very small, just as in the earlier case. So an observer watching location pi would seem to see Dumyat replaced instantaneously by a whale (at t1) and the whale by an iceberg (at t2). Those impressed by spatiotemporal continuity as a criterion for identity and unaware of the brief discontinuities in time between Di, W2 and I3 might conclude that some one thing could begin its career as a hill, then change into a whale before becoming an iceberg. It might be easier to take such a view if one believes, with Quinton, that 'the temporal parts of an endur- ing thing would have been a perfectly good thing of that kind if they had existed on their own without the other phases which in fact preceded and followed them', and then the subsequent discovery of the discontinuities might be viewed with some relief.13

Now, in our latest case, Di, D2 and D3 show spatial scatter as well as the sort of temporal discontinuity already displayed in Figure 2. The problem is whether there is any way in which a mereologist could allocate these stages to one single item, that item being a hill. We might think that whereas in our previous case Dumyat was 'hopping' on the spot, in the new case it 'hops' from place to place. But what could underpin this allocation of separate stages to the one object in either case? There are three conditions, I suggest, which would do the job. The first condition deals with



DISCONTINUITY 251

structure, and I have dwelt on this condition elsewhere.14 Crudely, the condition requires that each stage and its successor be similar in geometric structure. The similarity does not need to be exact, but there are limits of a fairly stringent sort to the degree of structural change we would allow in cases where the stages are separated by such brief gaps.

The second condition requires similarity of material from one stage to the next, and again, although the requirement is not that there should be exact similarity, clearly we would not expect great changes to the material stuff of an object from moment to moment. Finally, the third condition requires that each stage-in Lewis's phrase-'causally depends for its character' on the stages immediately before it. 15 'Character' here means no more than structure together with matter.

Applying these conditions gives us something like the desired result in both cases. Dumyat hops on the spot in the Figure 2 case in that each stage seems to be causally dependent on the previous stage for its structure and matter, and the same relation between successive stages in the second case gives us grounds for allocating each of them, scattered as they are in space, to one and the same object. The question of sortals will be discussed shortly. But that the object falls under the sortal 'hill' will, in my view, be a consequence of its manifesting appropriate structure and matter in each of its stages. In terms of the notion of the place of an object (introduced earlier) we can observe that the geometrical closeness in structure between stages explains the congruence, or near congruence, of the places coinciding with each stage.

It might be objected that there can hardly be a causal connection between successive Di's for the simple reason that there is no means by which any causal mechanism could operate. For no Di is contiguous in space and time with its neighbour, and even Hume, at least in Treatise, requires such continguity between a cause and its effect (see Treatise I, iii, 15). Now, it can hardly be replied to this kind of point that Dumyat simply goes missing in the brief intervals: for if Dumyat has popped into a higher dimension, or gone off elsewhere for the vital fraction of a second, we have no puzzle. For we would then have no interruption in its existence and so no episodic object. And it might, of course, be argued that in the kind of case described here, it is far more sensible to think of Dumyat as having gone elsewhere for these brief intervals rather than to imagine it has gone out of existence. Likewise, physicists are reluctant to count any of the forces of nature as acting at a distance, although I know of no evidence so far to suggest that,



252 NOUS

for example, there are gravitons. The case of gravity is indeed illuminating here. For although gravitons would provide appropriate quanta for mediating gravitational forces, we are still quite clear that bodies have gravitational effects on other bodies even while doubting that gravitons exist. Perhaps, if we were really sure that Dumyat goes out of existence every so many hours, we would look for new quanta to explain the replication of changes wrought upon one Di in its neighbour. And if there were not at least prima facie evidence for each Di being causally dependent on its predecessor-if variation between a given Di and its neighbours could be as great as we please-then of course there would be no case for claiming survival from one Di to the next.

VI. STRUCTURE AND SURVIVAL

For the present, I do not want to dwell at length on questions about matter, or about the causal-or at least cause-like-relations among stages. Both conditions are fairly obvious and at the same time, I suspect, less important than the structural one. We should observe, however, that the causal condition will require some gloss in terms of appropriate causal relations. Suitably tidied, the condition will apply to both structures and stuff. Suppose, for example, we quarry away some of the material from a particular Dumyat-stage; we should then expect the subsequent stage to lack the appropriate amount of matter and to show the consequential change in structure. Given ignorance of just what is going on in the case of episodic objects, and by analogy with the case of gravity, we can perhaps become sure that the stages are indeed causally related, although we may be unable to say just what the responsible causal mechanism is.

As for matter itself, we know that at the submicroscopic level what matter an item is made of is associated with the details of its fine structure. Elsewhere, I have argued that things can survive a change of fine structure, hence a change of matter, so long as their macroscopic structure and overall dimensions remain fairly constant.16 Thus there would be circumstances where, if we managed to transmute the material of a certain object, while preserving its form, we would judge that the original object had, to some degree, survived in or as the new item. There are perfectly good reasons, given the nature of human perceptual mechanisms, just why we should make such judgments of survival.'7 It is hardly surprising, then, that the similarity of overall geometric structure between each Di and its neighbours is an important component in underpinning our identification of the scattered whole consisting of the various stages with one thing of the kind hill. In terms of the notion of



DISCONTINUITY 253

survival, the situation could be described in the following way. Each Di survives as the subsequent Di + 1 provided our three conditions are met. 'Survival' here should not be confused with identity, for, as I use the term, one thing can properly be said to survive in, or as, another thing. But the chain of survival relations among the stages is precisely what establishes the claim that the scattered whole in question constitutes one hill. And this claim can be made in either the Figure 2 or Figure 3 case.

Turning to the psychological case, it might seem that at the level of functional description suggested by the use of terms like intention, need, desire, memory and so on, a mental state is not to be taken as a concrete item. Nevertheless, it is possible to look for analogues for the three conditions. The contents of short and long term memory, material undergoing perceptual processing, one's store of ambitions, intentions and so on can all be regarded as in some sense psychological matter. This material is no doubt structured within devices (thus long term memory has, among others, a semantic level of organization) which themselves have structural relations with each other. The recollecting from long term memory of an experience entered some time before would be an example of how a structural change in one state is in part causally dependent on a material (and associated structural) change in an earlier state.18

The solution to our earlier puzzle regarding the two situations in Figure 1 is that in the case of amnesia the causal condition explains the structure and material present in the c-phase in terms of the psychological states during phase b. Of course, the psychological malfunctions of the b-phase were, we supposed, the result of an infection. But there is still a general dependence of psychological states in the c-phase upon those in the b-phase. By contrast, in the branching case, there is no general dependence of the c-phase on the b-phase, and the failure of the latter phase to contain memories of events witnessed during the b-phase is not the result of damage sustained during the b-phase. In this way, we can make sense of amnesia as the consequence of an important disturbance in a sequence of causally connected mental episodes. Branching, on the other hand, does not leave its mark on subsequent mental episodes in anything like the same way. Certainly, it is because of the branching that c fails to have memories of the b-phase. But this time the causal explanation makes no reference to failures in the pro- cesses occurring in the b-phase. In this way, our three conditions seem to offer the prospect of a solution without any essential appeal to continuity of body.

To suggest a different application of the model proposed here, let us suppose that, as a kind of practical joke, the Stirling philosophy



254 NOUS

department records an entirely bogus episode of The Archers, and cunningly arranges for it to be broadcast in place of one of the regularly scheduled episodes. A radio serial is, of course, an episodic object whose scattered episodes are all allocated to the one item. Now it is immediately clear that our bogus episode of The Archers could pass for the real thing if we ensure that it satisfies the appropriate correlates of our three conditions. Of course, it might be objected that matter, structure and lawful causal relations can only be talked about in a metaphorical way in connection with such an example. But if we achieve the dovetailing of our bogus episode with its neighbours, by means of reasonably stable characterisation, good mimicry of the voices of the several characters, continuing the action, adoption of the appropriate style and so on, then we would have again satisfied at least metaphorical counterparts of our three conditions. One way of thinking about it is as follows. Let the fictional matter of an episode be the various characters, the village of Ambridge, its surrounding farms, and a number of happenings (which we can take to be event types). The structure of an episode is then given by the various relations exhibited in the episode among the characters, places and happenings. On this view, structure changes throughout an episode. The supposed causal dependence of one episode on another is revealed in the way the terminal structure of one episode induces a specific initial structure in its successor. Indeed, if we carried it off well enough, our episode might well have to be reckoned to the total of episodes that constitutes The Archers, and in this way our example threatens the view that the identity of the series depends on the authorised script in much the way that the identity of a musical work might be held to depend on the composer's score. 19

We can further test the three conditions by considering what our response to various other cases might naturally be. Would we be inclined to count a stage of Mount Everest along with a subsequent stage of the Empire State Building as constituting one thing of a kind? Surely not, and the reason is that we have neither a structural, material nor causal basis for such a claim. Now take a corridor with a number of similar doors facing on to it. We discover, let us suppose, that doors, too, are afflicted with Dumyat- like discontinuities. How would we decide whether a given door was hopping on the spot or changing places with others elsewhere on the corridor? Our conditions suggest, once again, the way to seek an answer. We make a scratch on one door-stage and then see if this slight structural modification reappears on the next door- stage to occupy the same doorway (assuming, of course, that we



DISCONTINUITY 255

have settled the matter of the identity of the doorway). If it does, and the new door-stage is made of similar material to the original, then we have a fairly good case for concluding that we can allocate the new stage to the same door as we allocated the original. Our scratch test also provides prima facie evidence of the right sort of causal dependence between stages.

All this looks like good news for those who are happy to accept a mereological stance. Since they are comfortable in the recognition of scattered objects in any case, mereologists would find the suggested conditions helpful in letting them identify, from among the vast range of scattered entities, those which are unitary, albeit discontinuous, objects of a kind. Would they need, in addition, a sortal condition to justify such assignments of stages to scattered wholes? We might at first think that it is the fact that each Di falls under the same sortal which along with our other conditions clin- ches the question of Dumyat's identity. In the world as we know it, continuity under a sortal is often thought to be a sufficient condition of identity. But here we must be wary; for it is not clear what explanatory force such a sortal condition would have. In the case of living things, what would lead us to class a number of objects as all falling under some same sortal? Domestic cats all display certain structural similarities to each other, have similar material constitutions and depend causally for their structure and matter on the structure and matter of their parents. Indeed, as I have pointed out elsewhere, one natural way of thinking about survival is in terms of the way parents can be said to survive in their offspring, and where we have survival we have some degree of structural similarity, lawful causal dependence, and-often-similarity of material con- stitution.20 So if we suppose that the sortal 'hill' can apply to any of our stages in the Dumyat case, our three conditions seem to explain why the same sortal applies to other stages. What continuity under a sortal amounts to, then, is continuity satisfying the proposed conditions, and we add nothing to the conditions by attempting to impose a further requirement concerning sortals.

But does the sortal 'hill' apply to any of our stages? This is a matter about which we must be extremely careful, and what I have to say here is of necessity tentative. What we were trying to do was to find some way that might enable us to count the various scattered Dumyat-stages as stages of one hill. But this is not to imply that any of the stages themselves is, properly, an item of the sort hill. Quinton's doctrine, alluded to in Section IV, might come to mind here. No doubt there are things such that ten second, ten hour, or ten day manifestations of them would be, in Quinton's



256 NOUS

words, 'perfectly good things of that kind'. But it is not clear that whales, icebergs, and hills are examples of such things. Suppose something looking like a mature whale puts in a ten minute ap- pearance in my garden. But now suppose that I find it had no previous or subsequent history: I saw the entire life of a ten minute individual. Was it a whale, or a stage of a whale, that I saw? It seems to me doubtful, and the example suggests that Quinton's claim is not at all self-evident. There is, however, a truth which corresponds to Quinton's claim. This is that, roughly speaking, each stage allocated to an item of kind S should possess that structure in virtue of which a succession of such stages, connected according to our requirements, would be an S rather than anything else.

This, then, completes the description of one kind of solution to the puzzle we started with. To accept the solution requires in turn an acceptance of a mereological stance, and this is certainly not congenial to everyone. However, the mereologist has proved to be in a strong position for making sense of the bizarre state of affairs in which we find ourselves confronted with a world of discontinuous objects. What we must do now is shift metaphysical focus and consider the prospects for a non-mereological solution. Such a solution is perfectly feasible, though leaving us with a rather more fragmented world than the mereologist's. For I want to suggest there is at least one way of coming to terms with the Dumyat puzzle which recognizes that in such an eventuality we would have to recognize that the world contains no broad objects. Whereas the mereologist saves the broad object at the cost of allowing it to be discontinuous, the alternative about to be mooted recognizes that each Di is a new object and tries to preserve our use of the same name for each such object in the face of such recognition.

Let us agree that considerations about structure and so forth do indeed suggest that each Di survives as its successor. Why not now use the name 'Dumyat' for any extended stage and use the argument from survival to justify using the name for any appropriately related stage? Of course, we are not now literally speaking of stages at all, for there is no broad object to which we are assigning the various things called 'Dumyat'. Rather, we are following the con- vention that we use a name to apply to an item or to any clear survivors or ancestors of that item. This is to depart from the orthodoxy that the identity of an object is what makes sense of the applications to it of the same name at different times. But in a world lacking broad objects, there may be little point in trying to persist with the orthodox view.

Strictly, then, any claim about Dumyat is really a claim about past, present or future Dumyats. For any item called 'Dumyat'



DISCONTINUITY 257

will-if our original case is recalled-last no more than 167 hours; and of course, we will not know in the normal run of things whether a new Dumyat has come on the scene even as we speak about the hill. Can we really make sense of this as an alternative to the mereological view just canvassed? I think we probably can, once we have managed to focus down onto a world where things have strictly limited persistence. Incidentally, it is not being suggested that in some way Dumyat supervenes on the various shortlived stages occupying a certain place. Rather, the present suggestion is that we drop the notion that there is some thing (Quine's broad object) that is the aggregate of all the structurally and materially similar items that successively occupy one and the same place and that we do not retreat either to a conception of some supervenient item occupying that place. Instead, we believe that there is a sequence of Dumyats, each one a different hill, and the survival of each hill in the sequence as its successor is what legitimises the application of the same name to each succeeding item. We are in a position rather similar to that of the person who ostends various river-stages while uttering the same name; but instead of this procedure being used, as in Quine's example, to show that we are talking about one spatiotemporally extended object, we are to be taken as indicating that we are talking about a sequence of items, each of which is a survivor of the item originally ostended.

Now although such a procedure seems possible in theory, would it not prove entirely unworkable in practice, due simply to the enor- mous difficulties involved in saying simple things like 'I mean to climb Dumyat tomorrow'? I suspect that, if we were to adopt this second solution, then, whatever our official metaphysical view, we would find ourselves speaking about Dumyat in much the way we currently do. This is not all that hard to explain. After all, we do use language in other contexts that seems natural even while we are aware that it is not quite exact. For example, the sentence 'The sun rose at 8:24 this morning' clearly needs to be paraphrased in terms of one mentioning the rotation of the earth before a truth can, strictly speaking, be expressed. A worse problem may seem to confront us if we recall the worries already expressed about Quin- ton's doctrine. Would not the claim 'Dumyat is a hill' now fall foul of the criticism that what we are doing is predicating '. . . is a hill' of some temporal phase of an object? This worry, though, is seen to be misplaced once we recognise that, on the view pre- sently being canvassed there is no one thing which each Dumyat is. Some objects may run for more than 167 hours. But in a world of impermanent things, perhaps 167 hours of a hill is all that we are going to get of it. The broad object, then, is the 167 hour hill;



258 NOUS

thus, while the mereological response to the puzzle was to wonder what features ensured that each Di was a temporal part of the same hill, the present view takes these same features as explanatory of why we give the same name to each member of a sequence of distinct hills.

It does seem to me that this latest solution is considerably less attractive than the mereological one. Indeed, I have pursued it mainly to be able to contrast it with the mereological one, for this contrast reflects two different ways that science can have an impact on our thinking. According to our latest 'solution', we go on speaking as before while recognizing that our discovery has revealed a gap between our natural way of speaking and the way we have come to think-under the impact of science-things in fact are. Our example of talk about 'sunrise' illustrates this point quite adequately. The mereological solution, on the other hand, can be compared with the scientific discovery that the best microscopic description of seemingly solid and continuous objects requires us to recognize that they are composed of spatially discontinuous aggregates of tiny parts. Indeed, the hardness of diamond, for example, can be explained by the structural relations among its discontinuous parts; likewise, the structural, and other, affinities among stages explains, on the mereological conception, how the scattered Dumyat-stages make one hill.

VII. CONCLUSION

It has not been my suggestion to argue that the two views suggested here exhaust the possible solutions to the Dumyat puzzle. Rather, both ways round the puzzle avoid recourse to the idea of embodiment, avoid positing some perhaps abstract entity to supervene on the various discontinuous fragments, and avoid ex- tending the notion of continuity to cover what is a case of discontinuity. Although the notion of survival has had a key role to play in both stories, it is interesting to note that I deploy this notion in a somewhat different way from Parfit.2' For Parfit, survival is a kind of surrogate for identity, capturing what we usually take to be important about identity. When we come to a case of fission, where the presence of a rival rules out an identity claim, then survival will, Parfit argues, be what is important. For Parfit, then, I survive as myself in the normal course of events. But in my usage, survival is a relation between distinct things. Each successive Di is a distinct thing that survives in (or as) its successor. When we turn to the psychological case, we will have to recognise that each episode of consciousness in a single life is itself a distinct item. My



DISCONTINUITY 259

view, which I argue elsewhere, is that when we come to settle the issue of personal identity the degree of survival of one conscious episode in (or as) another is crucial.22 Unlike Parfit, my approach to the case of personal identity is not to look for an answer to a question concerning the survival of a person but instead to consider the quite separate question of the survival of one mental episode in or as its successor.

Although the two stories told here in response to the Dumyat problem may not seem equally plausible, the success of the mereological account at least suggests that it may be reasonable to apply the theory of survival to the more complex case arising in the philosophy of mind. The working out of that account to the question of personal identity clearly lies beyond the scope of the present investigation. But I hope that it has been demonstrated that there is at least one sensible route for conceptual development to take in the face of our initial puzzle. And the centrality of the notion of survival to that route is not without interest.23

NOTES

1Derek Parfit, 'Personal Identity and Rationality', Synthese 53 (1982) 227-41. The quoted passage occurs on p. 229.

2The term 'co-consciousness' is defined by Wiggins in 'Locke, Butler and the Stream of Consciousness', in A.O. Rorty, ed.: The Identities of Persons, (University of California Press, 1976) p. 144. Parfit's related notions of connectedness and continuity are described in his 'Personal Identity', Philosophical Review 80 (1971) 3-27. They figure also in his book Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984).

31n section 97 of his book, Parfit explicitly assimilates the cases of amnesia and branching. See also the treatment of 'indirect psychological continuity' in Robert Elliot's 'Going Nowhere Fast', Analysis 42 (1982), p. 214.

4Here, as elsewhere, I follow Wiggins in the use of the term 'neo-Lockean'. (See his paper mentioned in note 2.)

5I make this point in a critical study of Hirsch's book (see next note)in No6ls 18 (1984). A further complication arises in the case of personal identity if we notice, following Parfit, that there can be both 'simple' (i.e. non-reductionist) and 'complex' (i.e. reductionist) views about personal identity. (See the paper referred to in note 1 and also his book.) I have argued elsewhere that a plausible way of understanding competing accounts of education is in terms of conceptual development (see my 'Analysis, Development and Education', in British Journal of Educational Studies 34 (1986) 249-67). For a review of the problems specifically associated with alternative developments of the concept of a person see the last three chapters of my book Conditions of Identify (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987).

6Eli Hirsch, The Concept of Identity (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1982) p. 235. 7We can put this more formally, perhaps, by saying:

For any time t in x's career, and for any positive number n, there is a time interval around t such that for any t' in the interval the extent of nonoverlap between the place which x occupies at t and the place which x occupies at t' is less than n (Hirsch, op. cit., p. 17).

8For Lewis's account, see the paper referred to in note 15. Commenting on the Parfit paper mentioned in note 1, Donald Regan remarks: 'Derek . . . tends to equivocate, both when he uses the word 'continuity' and when he uses the word 'connected' between two ideas that go together. One of these is roughly the idea of a development from one state



260 NOUS

to another without 'jumps'; and the other is the idea of resemblance of the end points of the development' (loc cit, p. 224). It may be that Regan here has in mind the same equivoca- tion I discuss.

9Robert Nozick, Philosophical Explanations (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981) Chapter 1. '0A. Quinton, The Nature of Things (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) p. 63. "1W.V. Quine, 'Identity, Ostension and Hypostasis', in From a Logical Point of View

(Harper, 1963) p. 69. 12Nelson Goodman, Fact, Fiction and Forecast (Bobbs-Merrill, 1965) p. 51. 13See Quinton, op cit, p. 77. For extreme faith in spatiotemporal continuity see Marjorie

Price's 'Identity Through Time', Journal of Philosophy 74 (1977) 201-217. Her argument is discussed in detail by Baruch Brody in his Identity and Essence (Princeton University Press, 1980) pp. 76-81.

14In 'Survival', Synthese 59 (1984) 339-61. For a general overview of what is lacking in current treatments of identity see my critical study mentioned in note 5.

15David Lewis, 'Survival and Identity', in The Identities of Persons, A.O. Rorty, ed. (University of California Press, 1976).

16See my Synthese paper mentioned in note 14 for a more detailed discussion of such cases. '7See V. McCabe, 'The Direct Perception of Universals', Synthese 52 (1982) 495-511. 18For a conjectured example of a small part of such a structure see the diagram in

Daniel Dennett's Brainstorms (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1978) p. 155. "9Thus Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art (Bobbs-Merrill, 1968) Chapter V. 20See A.A. Brennan, 'Personal Identity and Personal Survival', Analysis 42 (1982)

44-50 and also the Synthese paper referred to in note 14. There are problems about just what survives in the parent-child case. Some of these I deal with in Conditions of Identity and in 'Survival and Importance', Analysis (1987) forthcoming.

21See his papers already referred to in notes 1 and 2. 22In 'Amnesia and Psychological Continuity', Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplemen-

tary Volume II (1985) 195-210. The issues of personal identity, amnesia and branching are discussed in greater detail in this paper.

23Many people, both at Stirling and elsewhere, have commented on an earlier draft and made valuable suggestions. A version of it was also read and discussed in seminars at the Universities of Glasgow and Bristol. For comments that have helped shape the present version I am grateful to Christopher Kirwan, Hugh Mellor, Alan Millar, Neil Tennant and Ian Wilson.



Discontinuity and Identity

Documents

Transcript of Discontinuity and Identity