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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
    Statements
    321,452
    Perspectives
    108,905
    Topics
    42
    Home/Original/inverse
    See Original
    Inverse View

    It is not the case that The memory criterion for personal identity is circular and therefore uninformative as a sufficient condition for persistence.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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    • 1.To genuinely remember an experience is to remember one's own experience — memory is factive and first-personal.
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    • 2.Determining whether Blott's apparent memory of Clott's experience counts as genuine memory requires already knowing whether Blott is Clott.
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    • 3.A criterion for personal identity cannot presuppose the answer to the very question it is meant to settle.
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    Reasons Against

    2 perspectives
    Reason against 1 of 2
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    • 1.Reid's 'brave officer' paradox demonstrates that memory-based identity generates transitivity failures: the general remembers the flogging but not the boyhood theft the officer remembered.
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    • 2.A criterion that yields contradictions via Leibniz's Law—where A=B and B=C but A≠C—is not merely circular but logically incoherent as a sufficient condition.
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    • 3.Locke's own account cannot resolve these transitivity failures without importing a non-psychological substance to anchor identity, undermining the criterion's autonomy.
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    Reason against 2 of 2
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    • 1.Shoemaker's causal theory attempts to escape circularity by requiring that memory traces be caused 'in the right way' by the original experience, but 'the right way' covertly reintroduces personal identity as the causal relatum.
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    • 2.Any causal-memory criterion must distinguish genuine memory from quasi-memory (Parfit's notion) by appeal to same-person causation, making the criterion ineliminably self-referential.
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    • 3.A sufficient condition that smuggles the analysandum into its analysans via causal constraints fails the non-circularity requirement that Nozick and Shoemaker themselves endorse as necessary for reductive accounts.
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