Under reductionism, questions about identity under counterfactual causal origins are not uniquely problematic for persons, since the same indeterminacy afflicts all complex physical objects with branching histories.

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Reasons For

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Reason for

1.Reductionism treats identity as determined by physical composition; persons are physical objects, so indeterminacy afflicts both equally.
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2.Complex objects like ships and statues face genuine identity puzzles under branching histories, showing the problem is general, not person-specific.
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3.If persons had special metaphysical status, we'd need non-physical criteria for identity, contradicting reductionist commitments.
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Reasons Against

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Reason against

1.Persons have first-person subjective continuity of consciousness; ships and statues lack this, making the indeterminacy genuinely different in kind.
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2.We have practical identity criteria for persons (psychological continuity, memory) that may resolve counterfactual indeterminacy; inanimate objects lack these.
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3.That a problem is general to physical objects doesn't show it's equally tractable for persons, whose identity stakes are metaphysically and morally distinct.
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Key Terms

Branching histories(situations where counterfactual origins become ambiguous): When something could have developed in multiple different ways from its past, like a tree with many possible branches it could have grown.
Causal origins(what makes an object what it is): The initial causes or events that brought something into existence—where something came from and what caused it to happen.
Identity(Adams treats identity statements as a variety of atomic formula rather than a logical truth exempt from existence presuppositions): A relation between an object and itself, expressed as an atomic formula (a=a), subject to the same existence-entailment conditions as other atomic predicates under GSA
Reductionism(The second dogma identified in Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism" (1953, 20)): The belief that each meaningful statement is equivalent to some construct upon terms which refer to immediate experience.
counterfactual(Modal logic and epistemology): A conditional statement concerning what would be the case if some antecedent condition were true, evaluated across possible worlds; contraposition does not hold in general for counterfactuals.
indeterminacy(Decision-making under uncertainty in political and legal contexts): Uncertainty or lack of definite knowledge afflicting one or more conditions of a decision procedure, making it impossible to fully specify choices and their outcomes
persons(Metaphysical units in reductionism): Psychological units constituted by psychological continuity over time, serving as the basic moral units under Parfit's Moderate Claim.

Connections

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Personal Identity1 linked

Complex objects like ships and statues face genuine identity puzzles under branc...If persons had special metaphysical status, we'd need non-physical criteria for ...Persons have first-person subjective continuity of consciousness; ships and stat...Reductionism treats identity as determined by physical composition; persons are ...

Details

Type: claim
Perspectives: 2 (1 for, 1 against)
Edits: 1 edit