In this first study, I shall begin with the most modest sense that can be given to the notion of identification. To identify something is to be able to make apparent to others, amid a range of particular things of the same type, of which one we intend to speak. It is along this path of identifying reference that we encounter the person for the first time, considering this term in an equally modest sense as globally distinguishing this entity from physical bodies. At this elementary stage, identifying is not yet identifying oneself but identifying "something."
1. Individual and Individualization
I want to establish here that the person is, to begin with, one of the things that we distinguish by means of identifying reference. To do this, I shall undertake a preliminary inquiry into the procedures by which we indi-vidualize "something" in general and consider it as an indivisible example within a species.1 Language, indeed, is constituted in such a way that it does not condemn us to the choice, as Bcrgson long maintained, between the conceptual or the ineffable. Language contains specific connecting units that allow us to designate individuals. In speaking of individualization rather than of individual, I highlight the fact that the ascription of individ-ualities can be based, depending on the various lexical resources of natural languages, on widely varying degrees of specification. One language may make finer dinstinctions than another in some particular area, and this corresponds to the respective features of each natural language; what is common to all is individualization, the operation rather than the result.
1. I propose the term "individualization" rather than "identification,51 more common to English than to French, to designate the procedure in question. Peter Strawson, however, to whom we shall give a great deal of credit in the second part of this study, has given the name Individuals (London: Methuen, 1957) to his own work on the identification of particulars.
I want to take this opportunity to express my debt to the work of J. C. Paricnte, Le Lanpfapfe et Pindividuel (Paris: A. Colin, 1973).
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As a process, individualization may be broadly characterized as the in-verse of classification, which eliminates the singular under the name of the concept. But if we simply stress the adjective "inverse," we then under-score two purely negative features of the individual, namely that it is a type that is neither repeatablc nor divisible without alteration. These ne-gations do indeed carry us to the side of the ineffable. But just because this is an inverse movement does not mean that language is without re-sources, as though it were limited to classification and predication. The individualizing intention begins where classification and predication leave off but draws support from these operations and, as we shall see, gives them new impetus. We individualize only if we have conceptualized.2 And we individualize with a view to describing more. It is because we think and speak in concepts that language has to repair, as it were, the loss caused by conceptualization. In order to do this, however, it docs not employ only the same procedures as those by which it conceptualizes, namely predication. What are these procedures?
Logicians and epistcmologists group together under the common heading "individualization operators" procedures as different as definite descriptions (e.g., the first man to walk on the moon, the inventor of the printing press), proper names (Socrates, Paris, the moon), and indicators such as I, you, this, here, now. Let us stress that at this stage of our inves-tigation, the human individual is accorded no privilege in any of the three classes of operators, not even in that of indicators, as we shall see in a moment. To designate one and only one individual is the individualizing intention. The privilege accorded the human individual in our choice of examples—the first man who . . . , Socrates, I, you, and so forth—comes from the fact that we are especially interested in individualizing the agents of discourse and of action. We do this by projecting the results of subse-quent stages of the process of identification, which we shall discuss in later studies, back to the first stage considered.
A word about each of the three categories of operators: a definite de-scription consists in creating a class that has but a single member through the intersecting of well-chosen classes (man, walk, moon). Logicians find an interest in this process for two reasons: (1) because it seems to be continuous with classification and predication, and (2) because it would appear to encourage the construction of a language free of proper names and indicators (i.e., free of personal and deictic pronouns), if indeed the other operators could be reduced to them. In fact, such a language can be
2. Characterizing individualization as the inverse of specification is to turn away from the direction taken by Leibniz with his "universal characters" (cf. Paricntc, Langage, pp. 48rf., and Strawson, Individuals, pp. 117ff.).
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constructed as Quine and others have shown. But as Pariente forcefully states, this is not a language that can be spoken in a concrete situation of interlocution; it is an artificial language that can only be written and read.
In this respect, if definite descriptions resort to classification and predica-tion procedures, this is with the aim, no longer of classifying, but of op-posing one member of a class to all the others. The minimal otherness that is required designates this clement of the class, but not the rest of the class.
A single one set off from all the others. In this sense, the aim of definite descriptions is indeed ostensivc, even if the procedure is predicative.
As for proper names, these are limited to singularizing an unrepeatable, indivisible entity without characterizing it, without signifying it on the predicative level, and so without giving any information about it.3 From a purely logical point of view, abstracting from the role of appellation in the denomination of individuals (to which we shall return later), singular de-nomination consists in making a permanent designation correspond to the unrepeatable and indivisible character of an entity, regardless of its occur-rences. The same individual is designated by the same name. How? Simply by assigning the same phonic chain to the same individual in all of its occurrences. But, you might say, there is no relation between the two terms of this bi-univocal relation. But precisely this designation, which is at once singular and permanent, is not intended for description but for empty designation. Almost meaningless (Pariente), the proper name ad-mits all predicates and so calls for subsequent determination. Otherness, for a second time, is incorporated into designation: a single name, among the list of available names, permanently designates a single individual in opposition to all the others of the same class. Once again, the privilege accorded the proper names assigned to humans has to do with their sub-sequent role in confirming their identity and their selfhood.4 And even if in ordinary language proper names do not completely fill their role,5 at
3. For Frege's semantics, proper names in logic designate real beings. "Socrates" is the name of the real Socrates. The name is therefore a tag that is attached to the thing. We shall examine later the problem posed by the proper names of fictive beings, such as Hamlet and
Raskolnikoff.
4. In fact, in ordinary language we are familiar not only with the proper names desig-nating humans, because we are interested for other reasons too in a certain permanence belonging to peoples, families, and individuals, one which is constituted on another level than that on which the operators of individualization function. We name cities, rivers, and even stars in relation to human behavior with respect to them (inhabiting, navigating, relat-ing labors and days in calendar time). In this sense, identifyrelat-ing by namrelat-ing states more than individualizing.
5. The overdetcrmination alluded to in the previous note explains why common proper names are but rarely logically pure proper names. This is the case for family names: the rules
<>f denomination connected to the matrimonial status of women in our culture, at least in
least their aim is indeed to designate in each case one individual to the exclusion of all the others in the class considered.
The third class of individualizing operators, that of indicators, contains the personal pronouns ("I", "you") and deictic terms, which group to-gether demonstratives ("this," "that"), adverbs of place ("here," "there,"
"over there"), adverbs of time ("now," "yesterday," "tomorrow"), and verb tenses ("he came," "he will come"). Unlike proper names, these are inter-mittent indicators which—and this is of capital importance—designate in each case different things. What alone is determinant here is the relation to the utterance, taken as a fixed point. "Here" is any place close to the source emitting the message; "now" is any event that is contemporary with the message. "I" and "you," to be sure, stand out from the group as inter-locutors, subjects of utterance. At this stage, however, an utterance is still treated as an event in the world—a bizarre sort of object, to be sure, yet one occurring in the external world. This is why, situated in relation to an utterance as an event, all the indicators are on the same level. In one phase of his work, Russell thus attempted to organize the indicators in relation to the "this," in opposition to their characterization from another point of view as "egocentric particulars." Pariente, however, is correct in saying that the reference point for a "this" and for an ego is this utterance; in this sense, I should say that the demonstrative attached to the utterance wins out over the ascription to a particular speaker and listener, to a particular place and time.6
I draw three conclusions from this preliminary analysis:
1. Individualization rests on specific designation procedures, distinct from predication, aiming at one and only one specimen, to the exclusion of all the others of the same class.
2. These procedures have no unity apart from this aim.
3. Alone among the operators of identification, the indicators aim at the "I" and the "you," but they do so by the same token as the deictic terms, because they retain their reference to the utterance, understood as an event in the world.
2. The Person as a Basic Particular
How arc we to move from the individual at large to the individual that each of us is? In Individuals, P. F. Strawson develops a strategy which we
the predominant practice, result in the fact that Jeanne Dupont can designate two different people: the unmarried sister of Pierre Dupont and his wife.
6. The term reperage (reference point, location) is well chosen (Pariente opposes reperer to describing): it designates a very rudimentary stage, far removed from selfhood. It indicates a simple deccntering of all the facts and states of things within the sphere of utterance, still considered an event in the world.
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shall adopt as a general framework within which we shall later place new analyses, as we work toward a determination of the self that is increasingly ample and concrete. This strategy consists in isolating, among all the par-(Kiilars to which wc may refer in order to identify them (in the sense of individualizing given above), privileged particulars belonging to a certain type, which the author calls "basic particulars." Physical bodies and the persons we ourselves are constitute, in this masterful strategy, such basic particulars in the sense that nothing at all can be identified unless it ulti-mately refers to one or the other of these two kinds of particulars. In this way, the concept of person, just as that of physical body, is held to be a primitive concept, to the extent that there is no way to go beyond it, without presupposing it in the argument that would claim to derive it from something else.
If we had to provide an ancestor for this strategy, it would most cer-tainly be Kant—not the Kant of the second Critique, but instead the Kant of the Critique of Pure Reason. What we are going to undertake is indeed a sort of transcendental deduction of the notion of person, by showing that if we did not have available to us the schema of thought that defines this notion, we could not engage in the empirical descriptions that we make in this regard in ordinary conversation and in the human sciences.
Let us note straightaway that this treatment of the person as a basic particular docs not stress the capacity belonging to the person to designate himself or herself in speaking, as will be the case in later studies based on the power of the subject of utterance to designate itself; here, the person is one of the "things" about which we speak rather than itself a speaking subject. To be sure, the two approaches to the subject—that of identifying reference and that of self-designation—arc not to be radically opposed to one another. They will be seen to intersect in two ways from the very outset of the analysis. First, it is within a situation of interlocution that speaking subjects designate to their interlocutors which particular they choose to speak about out of a range of particulars of the same type, and that they assure themselves through an exchange of questions and answers that their partners are indeed focusing on the same basic particular as they.
The theory of basic particulars intersects a second time with that of self-reference in connection with the role that the former assigns to demon-stratives, in the broad sense of the term, and among these to personal pronouns and possessive adjectives and pronouns; these expressions, how-ever, are treated as indicators of particularity, hence as instruments of iden-tifying reference. Nevertheless, despite the mutual overlapping between the two theoretical approaches, in the referential approach one is not con-cerned with the question of whether or not the self-reference implied in the speech situation or in the use of demonstratives is part of the meaning given to the thing to which one refers considered as a person. What
mat-ters here is instead the sort of predicates characterizing that particular we call a person. The person, therefore, remains on the side of the thing about which we speak rather than on the side of the speakers themselves who designate themselves in speaking.
One must not, of course, be misled by the use of the word "thing" to speak of persons considered as basic particulars. It simply serves to indicate the fact that our initial investigation of the notion of person belongs to the general problem of identifying reference. A "thing" is something we speak about. And we speak about persons, in speaking about entities that make up the world. We speak about them as "things" of a particular type.
We may wonder, though, if we can get very far in determining the concept of person without bringing in, at one time or another, the power of self-designation that makes the person not merely a unique type of thing but a self. We may even wonder whether persons can be dis-tinguished from bodies if self-designation is not included in the very determination of the meaning ascribed to the sort of things to which iden-tifying reference is directed. In Strawson's strategy, however, the recourse to self-designation is intercepted, so to speak, from the very start because of the central thesis that determines the criterion for identifying anything as a basic particular. This criterion is the fact that individuals belong to a single spatiotemporal schema, which, it is stated from the start, contains us, in which we ourselves take our place. The self is indeed mentioned in this passing remark, but it is immediately neutralized by being included within the same spatiotemporal schema as all the other particulars. I would readily say that, in Individuals, the question of the self is concealed, on principle, by that of the same in the sense of idem. What matters for unambiguous identification is that the interlocutors designate the same thing. Identity is described as sameness (memete) and not as selfhood (ipseite). Having said this, I am not unaware of the advantage gained at the start by a problematic that prefers the question of the same over that of the self. It warns us, from the outset, against the possible drift toward private and nonpublic reference to which a premature recourse to self-designation might lead. By placing its main emphasis not on the who of the one speaking but on the what of the particulars about which one speaks, including persons, the entire analysis of the person as a basic par-ticular is placed on the public level of locating things in relation to the spatiotemporal schema that contains it.
The primacy accorded in this way to the same in relation to the self is especially underscored by the cardinal notion of reidentification. For it is not only a matter of being certain that we arc speaking of the same thing, but also that we can identify several occurrences of the thing as the same.
Now this can be done only by means of spatiotemporal location: the thing
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M mains the same in different times and places. Finally, the fundamental .iincness is that of the spatiotemporal framework itself: we use the same lumcwork on different occasions (Strawson, Individuals, p. 32). "Same"
i hen means unique and recurrent. As to the manner in which we ourselves IK long to the framework, this is not set up as a problem in itself. Yet, as will be confirmed by what follows, understanding the way in which our
< >wn body is at once a body like any other (situated among other bodies) .uid an aspect of the self (its manner of being in the world) is a problem
<>l vast proportions. However, one might bluntly reply, in a problematic
< >f identifying reference, the sameness of one's body conceals its selfhood.
And this will be the case as long as the characteristics related to possessive pronouns and adjectives ("my," "mine") have not been connected to the explicit problematic of the self. This will happen only within the frame-work of the pragmatics of language.
3. Bodies and Persons
Strawson's second broad thesis in Individuals is that the first basic parti-culars are bodies, since these best satisfy the criteria of localization in the single spatiotemporal schema. Moreover, the criterion and what satisfies it appear to be so well suited to one another that one may venture to say i hat what solves the problem is also what allows us to pose it (p. 40).
Strawson accurately observes that this mutual selection of the problem and its solution is characteristic of all transcendental arguments.
Strawson accurately observes that this mutual selection of the problem and its solution is characteristic of all transcendental arguments.