Research
Group 'Autonomous
Vehicles, Automation,
Normativity: Logical and
Ethical Issues', Eötvös
University, Budapest
Don’t
think about it! –
Thought-experiments and
personal identity
I revisit the issue of
whether certain
thought-experiments utilised to
draw conclusions about the
criteria of personal identity
should be thought of as reliable,
and whether certain criticisms are
well-placed to cast doubt on their
trustworthiness. I first introduce
the question thought experiments
attempt to provide answers to and
then describe Derek Parfit’s
(1984) classic experiment and
Bernard Williams’ (1975)
mind-swapping example. I continue
by reviewing the basic method of
these experiments and presenting a
two-pronged criticism thereof.
The first one assesses Jerry
Fodor’s (1964) general insight
about the experiments' logical
structure, which claims that the
intuitions which underlie answers
to the questions posed are not
reliable and we certainly should
not use any such answer as a means
of supporting a theory.
The second one introduces Richard
Wollheim’s (1984) narrative
approach to personal identity,
which criticises relational
theories such as Parfit’s and
presents a more unified approach.
Wollheim does not draw a strict
line between metaphysical
considerations and epistemological
and psychological ones: namely, he
says that our sense of identity is
closely related to an account
thereof.
I attempt to show that the doubts
and criticisms are well-grounded
and demonstrate that
thought-experiments fail to
provide a trustworthy way of
yielding results about what
personal identity consists in.
