The Role of Temporal Adverbs in Statements about Persons

Abstract

The possibility of a divided or duplicated self has always posed problems for philosophers who wish to defend the view that personal identity is based on psychological continuity. Such philosophers have faced the following difficulty. If an individual a were to divide or be duplicated, with both halves preserving all of a's memories, beliefs, etc., each descendant half would have an equal claim to be the person who did all that a did. But if they are both the same person as a, they should, by the transitivity of identity, be identical with each other. Since this seems absurd, it would seem that the supposition that personal identity is based on psychological continuity is also absurd. John Perry, however, has suggested a solution to this problem-one which will be discussed in detail below-which turns on recognizing the need for clear temporal adverbs in sentences like 'a is the same person as b'. ([4].) Perry's analysis of statements about personal identity is a valuable one. However, it is embedded in a general theory concerning the truth conditions of statements referring to persons-a theory covering not merely sentences of the form 'a = b' (a is the same person as b) but also 'a has (had, will have) F at t'. Perry attempts to provide a general analysis of sentences referring to persons, one which encompasses both identity statements and attributions of properties to individuals, and he is correct to analyze identity statements in this context. Nevertheless, the general theory which Perry presents faces serious difficulties. In this paper I propose an alternative to it. I begin with a sketch of Perry's solution to the problem described above, which involves the introduction of temporal adverbs into identity statements, and I present my own account of the truth conditions of temporally modified