Abstract:
Disputes over personal identity — over the metaphysics of people — are old wars. Philosophers feud over the classic questions: What makes something count as a person? What does it take for someone at different times to count as the same person? The assumption that runs through these disputes is, simply put, that there are facts of the matter waiting to be discovered and described by the right theory of personal identity.
Every part of this assumption, I argue, is mistaken. Questions about personal identity are not answerable as a ‘matter of fact’; they’re answerable only as questions about our linguistic and conceptual conventions. What’s to blame is epistemic inaccessibility: we have no good grounds for believing that there’s any right theory of personal identity. We can’t, therefore, say what the metaphysical facts about people are, or indeed whether there are any at all. Our most sensible recourse, I suggest, is to adopt a pragmatic view: to describe personhood or persistence as a property of any entity x is nothing more than to say that the relevant predicate — “is a person”, “is the same person” — is contextually assertible of x. We should accept this view on grounds that are themselves pragmatic: with no justification to make any firmer metaphysical claims, we should regard the shifty, stipulative, ordinary concept of “person” as good enough. It can still do the everyday work we want it to.
