Abstract
The sixth chapter makes the transition to the positive theory of persistence, which I develop in Chaps. 7, 8, 9, and 10. I start out from general remarks on problems concerning carriers and grounding from a meta-philosophical perspective. I then further specify the challenge of insufficient binding discussing the persistence conditions of human persons.
Keywords
…self and phenomenal continuity cannot come apart: all the experiences in a single …stream of consciousness are co-personal.
(Dainton and Bayne 2005 , 557)
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- 1.
The main difference between those two cases is clearly that it is not a priori clear that human consciousness will transcend theoretical explanations per se just like fundamental entities do. But on second glance, human consciousness seems to be a rather good example: I refer to Hume’s famous idea (1739/2000, T Intro; SBN xvii) that the essence of the mind remains in principle unknown to us.
Galen Strawson has expressed the idea, I am trying to illustrate considering the example of colour-predicates: “In the case of both ‘red’ and ‘pain’, the philosophical task is, very roughly, to reconcile Locke and Wittgenstein: one must, first, have a proper respect for the fact, and facts, of private experience, and acknowledge the element of truth in the doctrine of the ‘incommunicability of (private experiential) content’. At the same time, one must pay due attention to the consequences of the fact that words like ‘red’ and ‘pain’ are words in a public language that are learnt in a social context, and are, furthermore, learnt in such a way that they can be fully mastered and understood by different people despite possible differences in the character of their experience.” (Strawson 1989, 224–225).
- 2.
I use both then noun ‘precisification’ and the verb ‘to precisify’ following David Lewis; see Sect. 4.3.2.
- 3.
Tendencies towards such an unified, introspectionistic concept of grounding can be found in Robert Stalnaker’s work (2008, ch. 1).
- 4.
While my definition of those **carriers sets up phenomenological justification as the definitional criterion for ‘good’ carriers in the case of persons, other philosophers have proposed different criteria. I would like to mention – as an example case – only the normative aspects of personal identity discussed by Kristie Miller in her Persons as Sui Generis Ontological Kinds: “In addition to having a metaphysical status, persons have a normative status. Persons can engage in reason. Persons are selves, and thus have the capacity to care about themselves and to reason prudentially about their own interests. Persons are also ethical agents. Persons can act, or fail to act, ethically. They are the bearers of rights and duties, and hence can be praised and blamed for their actions. Call the cluster of practices that track both our ethical and our prudential concerns normative practices.” (Miller 2010, 568). I think that Miller is completely right in assuming that these criteria are important factors for persons, nevertheless, I want to defend the assertion without further argument that questions about persistence boild down to **carriers as discussed above: what really counts is phenomenological justification.
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Jaskolla, L. (2017). A Metaphilosophical Retrospect: Grounding. In: Real Fourdimensionalism. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 130. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65927-5_6
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