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How to Change Your Mind

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

William R. Carter
William R. Carter*
Affiliation:
North Carolina State University, Box 8103, Raleigh, NC 27695-8103, U.S.A.
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Extract

It no longer is true in a metaphorical sense only that a person can have a change of heart. We might grant this much — allow that a person may have one heart at one time and have another (numerically different) heart at still another time — and also resist the idea that a person can have a change of mind in anything other than a qualitative sense. In the discussion that follows, this standard view of the matter is called into question. If the argument presented here is sound, it can happen both that one person has numerically different minds at different times and that different people have the same (one) mind at different times. These possibilities, as I take them to be, call for reassessment of some well entrenched assumptions concerning personal identity and responsibility. In particular, they suggest that it may not be true that person A bears responsibility for making decisions person B previously made only on the condition that A is the same person as B.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , March 1989 , pp. 1 - 14
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1989

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References

1 D.C. Dennett, Content and Consciousness (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1969), 14

2 Thomas Mann, The Transposed Heads (New York: Random House 1941)

3 Mann, 68

4 Mann, 71

5 For more concerning rigid designators see Nathan U. Salmon, Reference and Essence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1981), chapters 1 and 2.

6 See Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1984), 204-9.

7 Sydney Shoemaker in Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne, Personal Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1984), 108-11

8 We might leave BST machines out of the picture. Isn't it possible that God, say, makes it true that two or more people are strongly connected to one previous person?

9 Obviously this is impossible, if a person (Jack, say) just is a mind. But since people have arms and legs and minds don't, people can't be identified with minds.

10 Mark Johnston, ‘Human Beings,’ The Journal of Philosophy 84, 2 (1987), 77

11 This merely indicates the general form of Johnston's very impressive anti-dualist argument. I'll ignore the details of the story here.

12 David Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of Mind (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul 1968) and David Lewis, ‘An Argument for the Identity Theory,’ in Philosophical Papers, Volume I (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983), 99-107

13 Johnston, 78

14 Ibid.

15 The environmental rider is meant to block Twin Earth objections to standard supervenience claims. See Tyler Burge, ‘Individualism in the Mental,’ in Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling, Jr., and Howard Wettstein, eds., Midwest Studies in Philosophy Volume IV (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1979), 73-121.

16 This leaves out many detials. See Sydney Shoemaker, Self-Knowledge and Self-Identity (lthacan, NY: Cornell University Press 1963), 23-4.

17 Johnston, 76

18 Judith Thomson seems to agree. See her ‘Ruminations on an Account of Personal Identity,’ in J. Thomson, ed., On Being and Saying: Essays for Richard Cartwright (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1987), 220-33.

19 For articulate skepticism concerning memory as a criterion of personal identity, see Terence Penelhum, Survival and Disembodied Existence (New York: Humanities Press 1970), 67.

20 This view is considered, and rejected, by John Searle in Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 1984), chapter 2.

21 Members of the Triangle Circle discussion group provided distressingly good critical comments for which I am grateful. I also am indebted to Alan Sidelle of Harvard University, and to a referee of this journal, for pointing out mistakes.