Abstract
Drawing on ideas developed by analytic philosophers P. F. Strawson and Donald Davidson (in the tradition of Kantian transcendental reasoning), I propose a broad understanding of what it means to be a person in the world—rather than merely being a member of a particular species (Homo sapiens)—building on the key idea that each person is aware of her/himself as one among others (both other persons and other objects in the world around us). This relational view offers an account of how we function as agents in the world, an account which sits alongside, but is not reducible to, the kinds of explanatory frameworks found in the natural sciences. It represents a rejection of both strong collectivism—where an individual’s identity is subservient to a larger group—and individualism—where each individual’s identity is viewed in atomistic, subjective and isolationist terms. This view of persons also steers a pathway between a Cartesian view of the mind, and a hard-nosed physicalist view which reduces our mental concepts to the language of physics, thus ensuring a central place to the language we use when we refer to ourselves and others. I find some affinity between my view and the “person-lives view” developed by contemporary philosopher Marya Schechtman.
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Notes
- 1.
This view of reference is defended, in various forms, by such linguistic philosophers as P. F. Strawson, Saul Kripke, and Hilary Putnam (on whom, see Stern, 2019).
- 2.
I have included reference to mothers here in order to point out that while there clearly is a way of tracking their existence over time by using an appropriate identity criterion, the kind of entity in question—which determines how that criterion is applied—can be a more general concept such as human, human person, animal, etc. In Wiggins’ terminology, “mother” would be a phase sortal, not a sortal per se (Wiggins, 2001). One issue which I am content to leave open is whether “human person” can be construed as a phase sortal under a broader term such as “human being” or “animal”. Since John Locke’s pioneering attempt, philosophers have taken on the challenge of providing an account of persons which accommodates conflicting intuitions: that we are causally connected to the world—including other persons—by way of our own bodies, and that qua persons—even human persons—we are so much more than just bits of matter or stuff. See my discussion of Strawson and Schechtman later in this chapter. It suffices for my purposes to assume that if persons are part of the furniture of the world, then there will be some underlying sortal concept which provides the required identity conditions.
- 3.
Being in, and regarding ourselves as being in, harmonious relations with objects—including and especially in nature—are reflected in the language and values that we construct as persons. Granted, there might be a residual issue about the kinds of identity criteria which are appropriate, not just for persons among other persons, but for persons among other objects in general. We see ourselves as distinct from one another, but also as distinct from the tables, chairs and mobile phones that are, from time to time, closely connected to us.
- 4.
There are numerous issues regarding Kant’s theoretical ideas contained in The critique of pure reason, which I will not explore here, including his commitment to a “noumenal” realm (things-in-themselves) of which we can have no knowledge, and a “phenomenal realm” (of objects) which are both empirically real and “transcendentally ideal”; the reality of the latter lies in their existing independently of one’s own experience, while their ideality lies in their being made intelligible to us by modes of conceptual organization which come from the mind.
- 5.
The phrase “each of us” conveys the idea that each individual subscribes to the initial premise in first-person terms, but in case this apparent assumption of plurality seems question-begging, the transcendental argument can be applied to myself, e.g. “I have experiences and thoughts; therefore some of these must be represented to me as being experiences and thoughts of objects or other persons”. It is then up to each individual to enact the same form of reasoning on her own behalf.
- 6.
See objections raised by Barry Stroud (in Stern, 2019) who puzzles ‘how…truths about the world which appear to say or imply nothing about human thought or experience’ (for example, that things exist outside us in space and time, or that there are other minds) ‘[can] be shown to be genuinely necessary conditions of such psychological facts as that we think and experience things in certain ways, from which the proofs begin’. Stern’s final comment, citing Strawson, concedes that “it seems unlikely that those engaged in the subject will ever cease to feel that ‘tenderness for transcendental arguments’ (Strawson, 1985, p. 21) instilled in them by Kant and others”.
- 7.
The “later” Wittgenstein refers to the author of such works as Philosophical Investigations.
- 8.
“It is the representation that makes the object possible rather than the object that makes the representation possible. This introduced the human mind as an active originator of experience rather than just a passive recipient of perception.” https://www.age-of-the-sage.org/philosophy/kant_copernican_revolution.asp.
- 9.
French philosopher Paul Ricœur contrasts the duality of “same” and “other”—which deals with idem identity—and the duality of “self” and “other” which is about ipse identity. In his Introduction to Oneself as another, he writes: “the selfhood of oneself implies otherness to such an intimate degree that one cannot be thought of without the other, that instead one passes into the other… To as [in the title] I should like to attach a strong meaning, not only that of a comparison, (oneself similar to another) but indeed that of an implication (oneself inasmuch as being other)” (Ricœur, 1992, p. 3). A little later in the same work, Ricœur explicitly describes his goal as a “transcendental deduction of the notion of person”, in the tradition of Kant and Strawson (p. 31). Notwithstanding his immersion in the Continental schools of hermeneutics and phenomenology, Ricœur was both keenly aware of, and somewhat sympathetic to, the analytic tradition.
- 10.
Strawson was somewhat sceptical about the merits of attempting to specify identity criteria for objects of reference, especially non particulars, but also about the precise specification for ordinary objects to which we make identifying reference, including persons (2000, Part II). In making the case for construing the concept of person as semantically primitive with respect to both mental and physical objects (i.e. the minds and bodies of persons), he seeks to bypass the specific question of identity criteria for persons and other such ontological issues as how the mental and physical “realms” are connected.
- 11.
The labels “M” and “P” are somewhat misleading, since they could also stand for “mental” and “physical”, respectively!
- 12.
Many concepts (and the terms which stand for them) are in common use, yet remain contestable. However, their contestability implies a degree of shared understanding about their meanings, otherwise we would not even be able to begin contesting them. In other words, we contest their meanings precisely because we share them.
- 13.
See also Davidson (1987). Strawson’s purpose, in referring to such terms as “walks” and “conducts an orchestra” is to focus on predicates that, while consciousness-implying, are associated with certain characteristic physical properties involving our legs and arms; as such, he claims, we are more readily inclined to accept (ii) (synonymity), notwithstanding the asymmetry expressed in (iii). As he acknowledges, we generally recognize such terms as standing for actions which, while intentional, are not purely mental events.
- 14.
The claim that notwithstanding the asymmetry described in (iii), mental predicates are applied unambiguously across first and third person cases, as in (ii), has been a point of contention between Strawson and Davidson. For a plausible attempt to reconcile the differences, while remaining sympathetic to both writers, see Avramides (1999).
- 15.
The transcendental nature of Strawson’s arguments allows him to reject various forms of scepticism on broadly conceptual (analytic) grounds. In his words, “[the sceptic’s] doubts are unreal, not simply because they are logically unresolvable doubts, but because they amount to the rejection of the whole conceptual scheme within which alone such doubts make sense” (1959, p. 35).
- 16.
Davidson is, of course, just one among many philosophers who have written on agency and related concepts. For a recent paper which deals with some of the issues touched on here, see Roelofs (2017).
- 17.
Vassilieva (2016, p. 105): “Consequently, a child becomes capable of self-reflective attention and forms an indirect perception of herself, that is, the perception through the perspective of a significant other. As Hermans and Hermans-Konopka conclude, ‘Along these lines the phenomenon of joint attention paves the way for inclusion of the other-in-the-self as a constitutive part of the self’s extension to the world’”.
- 18.
Davidson (1998/2001, pp. 86–87). On related views of ‘triangulation”:
-
i.
The feminist philosopher Barbara Thayer-Bacon defends a relational epistemology which shares many features with Davidson’s triangular view of awareness and knowledge; including: seeing oneself bound up in relationships with others as a condition of seeing oneself at all; and acknowledging each child’s experience as “an experience of a common world” from the very beginning (citing D. W. Hamlyn). While she does not emphasize the crucial link to language, she does focus on a component not discussed by Davidson or Strawson—the importance of being in caring and nurturing relationships (so that, for example, we will be moved to listen to one another) as a condition of becoming persons. Such virtues as care, as Thayer-Bacon points out, are social, not individualistic (and not socialistic either). Thayer-Bacon draws support from a number of feminist philosophers, including Nel Noddings, Sara Ruddick, Sandra Harding, and Seyla Benhabib. Thayer-Bacon also offers a balanced interpretation of Piaget—so often cast in opposition to his rival Vygotsky—in relation to such concepts as the egocentric self; for example, pointing out the fallacy of moving from appropriately regarding individual perception as involving a point of view (perspective) to regarding that perception as necessarily private or subjective (Thayer-Bacon, 1997).
-
ii.
Similar views on triangulation have been expressed within alternative (non-analytic) frameworks. As noted by Satoshi Higuchi, renowned Japanese scholar Manabu Sato refers to “three phases of learning that human beings can be engaged in: cognitive, interpersonal and internal”:
In cognitive learning, a person perceives and realizes the world through constructing the world he or she faces. In interpersonal learning, people learn from their communications with other people. Finally, internal learning is concerned with the self-recognition and self-discovery that is achieved through experiences with the world and others (Higuchi, 2005, p. 36)
-
iii.
Likewise, reflecting on the 20th Century Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurö, Erin McCarthy writes: “Heidegger’s, and in general the West’s, emphasis on individuality meant that the concept human being arising out of this emphasis, Da-sein among them, lost ‘touch completely with the vast network of interconnections that serves to make us what we are, as individuals inescapably immersed in the space/time of a world, together with others’” (McCarthy, 2014, p. 505). Also: “As Watsuji conceives it: ‘ningen is the public and, at the same time, the individual human beings living within it. Therefore, it refers not merely to an individual human being nor merely to society.’ What is recognizable here is a dialectical unity of those double characteristics that are inherent in a human being….. ‘the individual must be conceived as being situated in a spatial field of relatedness or betweenness not only to human society, but also to a surrounding climate … of living nature as the ultimate extension of embodied subjective space in which man [sic] dwells’” (pp. 506–507).
-
iv.
Ann Margaret Sharp, co-founder of Philosophy for Children, was also aware of these triangular relationships: “As R. G. Collingwood points out… ‘The discovery of myself as a person is also the discovery of other persons around me’” (Sharp, 1992, p. 61)…. Also, “Perhaps it is in the mystery and perplexity aroused by the analysis of concepts that we begin to see the emergence of personhood” (p. 58).
-
v.
Related themes are found in Continental philosophy. A commentator on Ricœur ascribes to him the view that: “Self-knowledge only comes through our understanding of our relation to the world and of our life with and among others in time in the world” (Pellauer & Dauenhauer, 2020). Søren Kierkegaard, Mikhael Bakhtin, Jacques Derrida, and Emmanuel Levinas, among others, expressed similar views. Regarding the last-mentioned, Julia Vassilieva writes: “For Levinas too it is engagement with the other that ushers subjectivity into being:
The explication of the meaning that a self other than myself has for me—for my primordial self—describes the way in which the other tears me from my hypostasy, from the here, at the heart of being or at the centre of the world where, privileged and in this sense primordial, I posit myself. But, in this tearing, the ultimate meaning of my ‘me-ness’ is revealed. In the collation of meaning between ‘me’ and the other and also in my alterity to myself, an alterity through which I can confer on the other my meaning of myself, the here and there come to invert their respective meaning’ (Levinas, 1991, p. 213). In Vassilieva (2016, p. 52).
Moreover, anchoring his philosophy in the category of the other, Levinas not only posits the other as an ontological condition of the subject’s being, but inscribes an ethical dimension into his system: it is an ethical relation to the other that ruptures the ‘egological’ primordial sense of being” (Vassilieva, 2016, p. 52). I take up the ethical implications of personhood in the next chapter.
-
vi.
Versions of Davidson’s triangulation metaphor have been used in psychology. Zittoun et al. (2007) offer an insightful analysis of several such accounts, covering the work of Vygotsky, Freud, Piaget, and Mead; likewise in the work of Viktor Frankl (see Sacks, 2020, pp. 43ff.) However, where the psychological focus is on development, Davidson is interested in the epistemic and semantic interconnections that the elements of the triangle represent.
-
vii.
There is evidence that infants’ earliest interactions with significant others, while pre-linguistic, involve elements of Davidsonian triangulation:
[Hubert] Hermans traces further forms of non-verbal dialogue through giving and taking between mother and child in the first year of life. Hermans argues that in the processes of giving and taking of objects, the interaction between a significant other and a child has a clear dialogical structure, although the child has not yet mastered language. While the infant does not understand the words uttered by a parent, he or she reacts to the intonations and gestures of the caregiver. Even if this interaction is not yet sign- mediated, it represents a co-regulated activity, and as such works as a bodily foundation for dialogical activities (Vassilieva, 2016, p. 106).
-
i.
- 19.
This is reminiscent of Kant’s insistence that he is conscious of himself not as he appears to himself, but only that he is rejecting the existence of the self—or of selves—is quite consistent with affirming the existence of myself as a person. Persons are objects with certain characteristic properties or qualities (i.e. in Strawson’s terms, those associated with both M and P predicates), which ground the idea of being one among others; the self, by contrast, is akin to the pure subject—the deictic this—which modern logic reveals as an incoherent conception (as is the more general idea of a subject “behind” all of its properties—see Chapter 2.5, above). Various schools of philosophy—not to mention Buddhist thought—are also dismissive of the self in this sense. I am claiming that contemporary philosophy of language—in the analytic tradition—provides a straightforward demonstration of this point.
- 20.
The idea that our cognitive schemes must leave room for something like the distinction between subjective and objective can be traced to Kant.
- 21.
I acknowledge that the semantic relationships involved here have remained open to question before and since Davidson’s writing; on the other hand, we can discern in this paradigm of analytic thinking a wake-up call in our own time, when pivotal concepts such as truth and judgment are often undervalued or ignored. Robert Neurath (personal communication) has suggested that scenarios such as that depicted in the movie(s) The Matrix render these Davidsonian claims implausible, given that what seems like reality to most people is actually a computer-generated model. However, the movie itself is premised on the fact that a small group of individuals (led by Morpheus and Neo and living beneath the surface of the “real” world) is aware of the fabrication and determined to expose and defeat it. Granted, ordinary citizens living in the Matrix are unaware of “the truth”, but we viewers are all too aware. Another potential objection is the idea that some beliefs are basic in the sense of being beyond doubt and, even, non-propositional in content. But it is not clear that for Davidson these warrant being described as “beliefs” at all.
- 22.
Also “[o]nly those who… share a common world can communicate; only those who communicate can have the concept of an intersubjective, objective world” (Davidson, 1994a, p. 234).
- 23.
Wittgenstein (2009, §243).
- 24.
See references in n.19 above.
- 25.
I reiterate my concern that some sections of the book—including this one—run the dual risk of condescending to academic philosophers, on the one hand, and confusing or frustrating my target audience—“the general reader”—on the other. Once again, I have made a genuine effort both to present these ideas in language which is broadly accessible, and to indicate their relevance to my wider concerns.
- 26.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt cites Paul Bloom’s claim that “we are natural born dualists”. Haidt continues: “Despite wide religious variations, most people (including many atheists) believe that the mind, spirit, or soul is something separate from the body, something that inhabits the body” (Haidt, 2012, p. 396). Anomalous Monism offers an explanation of this broadly held belief which does not depend on a dubious dualist ontology.
- 27.
In a recorded interview (Davidson, 1997), Davidson conceded that the claim made in (2) was not adequately defended in his original 1970 paper “Mental events”. He also clarified that it depicts a somewhat ideal situation which assumes that the various branches of science—but not psychology or the social “sciences”—will, ultimately, be reduced to a version of physics which is governed by strict laws.
- 28.
A parallel may be drawn between our use of mental terms (such as “belief” and, more specifically, “belief that…”) and our use of such “artifactual” terms as “train”. Identifying a specific train may seem a trivial enterprise, until we reflect on the meaning of such claims as “I catch the same train to work every morning.”. Here, the train in question is not a particular “token” object—specific set of carriages—but an object which adheres to a more abstract type or concept—presumably, in terms of specified route and timetable. Likewise, while a specific belief may be, ontologically, a material item in the brain, to talk of “sharing beliefs”, “having the same beliefs”, etc., is to refer to a more abstract type which obtains its coherence by being part of a network of beliefs and other propositional attitudes, in accordance with Davidson’s principle of the holism of the mental. Such networks are conceptual in nature, and we access them through our shared use of language.
- 29.
In order to avoid the trivialization of such conditionals in the event that their antecedents are false—e.g. sugar is never actually placed in water—we might use the counterfactual format: “Were sugar to be placed in water, it would dissolve”. Within analytic philosophy, much discussion has been generated about the logical form of conditional statements—in particular, the relation between their truth values and those of their constituent statements (antecedent and consequent).
- 30.
The molecular and other details of solubility might vary across substances, i.e., there may well be different -albeit related—scientific explanations of solubility. On the one hand, this suggests that from a semantic point of view, our ordinary concept of solubility does not depend on these details but, rather, on the conditional causality that we understand at a less scientific level. On the other hand, we can expect more uniformity when it comes to the range of explanations in the physical domain than in the psychological/personal domain. The scientific basis of sugar’s solubility in water does not depend on which particular lump of sugar or glass of water we are considering. The anomalous nature of the mental means that we cannot eliminate (generalize over) such concepts as belief and even particular instances of believing that… from our explanations of particular actions.
- 31.
This example comes from Tishman, Jay and Perkins (1992, p. 2).
- 32.
I discuss these issues, along with the nature and importance of dispositions in education, in my paper on dispositions (Splitter, 2010).
- 33.
I suggest that the term “community of minds” can reasonably be interpreted as “community of persons”. This sense of the cognitive importance of community was also made, albeit in somewhat different terms, by Hannah Arendt: “… we think, as it were, in community with others to whom we communicate our thoughts as they communicate theirs to us” (Arendt, 1968, pp. 234–235). Also: “The criterion for judgment, then, is communicability, and the standard for deciding whether our judgments are indeed communicable is to see whether they could fit with the sensus communis of others” (d’Entreves, 2019).
- 34.
The primacy of language in the production of thought has also been defended in the social sciences literature. Tom Andrews cites several social constructionist theorists as holding that:
Language is not an unproblematic means of transmitting thoughts and feelings, but in fact makes thought possible by constructing concepts. In other words, it is language that makes thoughts and concepts possible and not the other way around. Language predates concepts and provides a means of structuring the way the world is experienced (Andrews, 2012).
I would add that the laudable admonition to “think before you speak” is misleading in so far as it implies the existence of a mental act prior to, and separate from, the act of speaking. Leaving aside recitation or rehearsed speech, what we aspire to do is “speak thoughtfully”. In such cases, I suggest, there is no need to distinguish my speaking from my thinking.
- 35.
Writing from a political, rather than semantic perspective, Arendt also expressed support for the primacy of speech when it comes to disclosing our own identities: “This disclosure of the ‘who’ is made possible by both deeds and words, but of the two it is speech that has the closest affinity to revelation” (d’Entreves, 2019). And, yes, there is a certain irony here: we know that Davidson, Arendt, and Socrates extolled the value of talking and listening because they—or others—had the good sense to write it down and we had the good sense to read it!
- 36.
How might we respond to the claim that such a normative position regarding persons, community, truth, and reasoning applies only to what Jonathan Haidt describes as “a very small subset of the human population: people from cultures that are Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (forming the acronym WEIRD)” (Haidt, 2012, p. 112)? Haidt’s Theory of Moral Foundations, to be examined in the following chapter, maintains (empirically) that WEIRD people and cultures have characteristically different foundational moral values and standards, both from others in their own societies and from those in other societies. However, we do not have to read this theory as associating norms of truth and reasoning with WEIRD-ness, which leaves room for the idea that such norms might be regarded as universal across all persons. In subsequent chapters, I expand on this idea using the term “reasonable”.
- 37.
At the time of writing, the world is still reeling from the impact of the COVID-19 virus. Notwithstanding many still-unanswered questions, an almost universal response has been limiting physical contact as much as possible. This has led to a virtual explosion in electronic forms of communication and interaction (Zoom, etc.). Still, as one writer puts it:
The stress of social distancing and the palpable inadequacy of virtual interaction manifest a basic truth of personal identity: we are embodied beings, not streams of consciousness. In craving contact with each other, we crave physical not just psychological proximity. When we communicate through our screens, we feel the absence of others even as they share their thoughts. (Setiya, 2021)
In his recent book, Jonathan Sacks blames social media for what he calls “the move from ‘We’ to ‘I’” (Sacks, 2020, p. 59). Sacks also cites, approvingly, the work of such scholars as Martin Buber and Emanuel Levinas who, in their own ways, expressed the idea reiterated, as we saw, by Davidson, that “The counter-point of listening and speaking is at the heart of what it is to be a person” (pp. 57, 60).
- 38.
In his account of what has been called “radical interpretation” (also “radical translation”), Davidson has responded to the challenge of understanding the linguistic behaviour of someone “from scratch”, wherein we attempt to understand what they mean without any prior knowledge of their mental states, including of what they believe. According to Davidsonian scholar Jeff Malpas, Davidson adopts a certain “principle of charity” (note my reference to dispositions of respect and openness) which seeks “to optimise agreement between ourselves and those we interpret, that is, it counsels us to interpret speakers as holding true beliefs (true by our lights at least) wherever it is plausible to do so.” Malpas analyses this principle in terms reminiscent of Davidson’s views on mental holism, specifically, concerning assumptions of rationality in our beliefs and causal connections between our beliefs and the objects of those beliefs (i.e. what the beliefs are about) (Malpas, 2019). Regardless of the very real practical challenges hinted at here and to be discussed in subsequent chapters, Davidson’s admonition that “We must talk and, of course, listen” remains perhaps our most powerful tool when it comes to chip** away at the deeply entrenched tribal barriers that have become so characteristic of the contemporary socio-political environment.
- 39.
The degree of culpability, hence the parent’s response, might change if the window was shattered deliberately.
- 40.
I mean no normative response toward the wind or the fallen branch. Of course, neither wind nor branch responded to my question either.
- 41.
I am skating over a host of contentious issues here, including: whether human bodies—or members of Homo sapiens—constitute a genuine kind in nature, or even a kind at all (see my 2015, Chapters 4, 5); whether, in fact or in theory, there could be creatures satisfying P who are not human beings (so they might belong to a different kind altogether); whether the concept person actually needs any criteria of identity; and whether we should be concerned about thought-experiments—beloved of some analytic philosophers—which involve brain and body transplants, “Star Trek”-like teleportation, etc. Concerning the last of these, I am sympathetic to this comment from Wiggins:
Surely the character of a person is not independent of his or her physiognomy, and this physiognomy can scarcely be independent of the body. …the natural process, sustained by the numerous laws of biochemistry, physiology and the rest, by which a human being comes into existence, matures and eventually ceases to be, by ‘natural death’. That process is… certainly guaranteed not to produce multiples, not to transplant brains or half-brains, and not… to furnish new bodies to living, continuing brains.… in trying to make sense of the alleged processes involved, we lose track of who it is we are talking about, …. (Wiggins, 2001, pp. 234–241)
- 42.
Appropriate for an account of personal identity which takes, as its starting point, the views of John Locke and is firmly embedded in an analytic context, Schechtman is aware of the difference between quantitative (numerical) and qualitative identity, referring to the latter as “metaphorical”, rather than literal (Schechtman, 2014, p. 180).
- 43.
- 44.
For a similar view, but one which does not draw a clear distinction between numerical and qualitative identity, see Wallace (2019).
- 45.
Schechtman is open, as am I, to the possibility that some non-humans could be classified as persons, both in reality and in fiction. Psychological and biological differences notwithstanding, bonobos, dolphins, whales, and elephants, may be capable of living person lives, i.e. lives within certain characteristic kinds of social infrastructures (2014), pp. 131ff). Ludwig Wittgenstein, on the other hand, seems to have doubted that nonhumans could live such lives: “If a lion could speak, we could not understand him” (Wittgenstein, 1968/2009, §§531–532). The PLV has the potential to resolve a different kind of problem, arising from recent advances in “virtual assistant technology” (as in “Alexa”, for example) which offer the prospect of simulating “person-like” artifacts that are virtually indistinguishable from actual persons (a deceased loved one, for example). Degrees of qualitative similarity notwithstanding, such artifacts would not possess the multi dimensionality associated with actual persons, under the PLV. In short, in line with a common intuition, they would not be identical to our loved ones because they would not be persons at all.
- 46.
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Splitter, L.J. (2022). On Being a Person as One Among Others. In: Identity, Reasonableness and Being One Among Others. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-6684-2_3
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