Location






The seminar is held online. Join Zoom Meeting:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/889933315?pwd=Q3U3V3VQdXpXckhJYWRrcWRiMUhhQT09



14 May (Friday) 4:15 PM  ONLINE
Zsuzsanna Balogh
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.