appearance to which as subject everything else is related as determination, and note its identity throughout the time in which the determinations change.21
In this case, there is something substantial in identity statements. As it does concern objects of intuition, there is a substantive referent for the identity statement. “Same person" is meaningful because “different person” is conceivable. But “different I” makes no sense, and so “same I ” doesn’t inform us of anything.
But there is something even worse about using T as an identity fixer. In this case, Kant is unusually clear:
19 ibid, A363.
20 Strawson [1966], p i 6 5 21 Kant [1781], A 3 6 2
Despite the logical Identity of the 'I', such a change may have occurred In It as does not allow of the retention of Its identity, and yet we may ascribe to It the same-sounding 'I', which In every different state, even In one Involving change of the [thinking] subject, might still retain the thought of the preceding subject and so hand It over to the subsequent subject. 22
Here, "subject" Is used In the substantial sense. So what this quote means Is that the use of 'I' Is compatible with there In fact being a series of materially different subjects. Consciousness could pass baton-llke from one substantial subject to the next, and the assertion of Identity would be empty. An Important phrase here is the “same sounding T \ The T In thought Is same sounding because when I think of what I did or thought yesterday. It seems to me that the T which did those things Is the same T that is now thinking of them. From my point of view, It appears that there Is an Identity between T today and T yesterday. Kant’s point is that I am not entitled to conclude from this that It Is the same substantial T yesterday as today, as Its appearance as the same T Is compatible with there being various different substantial subjects. In this way, the T only appears, or “sounds”, the same - It may not be the same.
W e can sum up the core of Kant’s arguments about the “I think" by considering a short quote from the Critique;
I do not know an object merely In that I think, but only In so far as I determine a given intuition with respect to the unity of consciousness In which all thought consists. 23
We have knowledge about the way thinking things are solely In virtue of the fact that we are able to perceive them as objects of our consideration. But the way we do this cannot Itself be the object of knowledge. We cannot, as It were, turn the camera of mind back onto Itself.
In conclusion, there are two key points we need to take from Kant’s work.
22 ibid, A 3 6 3 23 ibid, B 4 0 7
Firstly, all thoughts have the possibility of having the "I think” attached. In other words, even when there is no occurrent belief “I think", the thought is in such a form that the “I think" could be appended to it. But secondly, we cannot use this fact to reach any conclusions about what subjects of thought really are. The “same sounding I” can be found across thoughts which are not part of one materially single subject. I have not offered any arguments for these conclusions and have only broadly outlined Kant’s. The fact that these are Kant’s conclusions does give them some weight. The least I have done is shown how a position which holds both of the above conclusions is not only possible, but has a notable historical precedent.
I shall consider the implications for Parfit of accepting Kant’s argument shortly, but first I need to consider another view of how thoughts require subjects.
3. Cassam; No l-thoughts Without a Subject.
Cassam offers a short, simple argument in favour of his view that l-thoughts always require subjects and then takes much more time discrediting various arguments against this view. He starts with the general claim that the content of a thought cannot be fully specified unless the truth conditions of that thought have been determined. Hence, to specify the content of the thought “that tree is burning," we need to know which tree is burning. Similarly, the content of the thought “I am in pain” cannot be fully specified unless we know who the thinker of the thought is. This entails that the content of l-thoughts cannot be specified unless there is a thinker of that thought. As Cassam puts it:
In order to know what the thought is one must know who the thinker is.24
A corollary of this is that to know there is a thought you must know there is a thinker. We must be clear precisely what this argument requires for first-
personal thoughts. On certain definitions, it is not a person. Cassam gives as an example Dennett’s conditions of personhood. On Dennett’s formulation, persons are rational, subjects of intentional ascriptions, language users, self- conscious, require a certain attitude to be taken towards them and are capable of reciprocity. 25 These last two conditions are required for persons to be moral agents. Cassam notes that even if the last two conditions are lacking, a being would still be capable of first-person thoughts. Cassam then makes it clear that his thesis is that “l-thoughts are only properly ascribable to subjects” 26 Cassam
simply assumes subjects are "like persons except that they do not necessarily meet the ethical conditions of personhood.”27 Whether or not Cassam is right, for the moment I shall accept the possibility of his conception of what it could
mean to be a subject, but not a person.
This point is important, as it opens up a gap between what can be called a subject of thought and a fully-fledged person. This invites investigating whether
ciiu iu u yii IIly ih u u y iil w iiii a b u u jyu i ucirinul b y reduced lo Ihe subjectless
thought, the personal can still be reduced to the impersonal, by which I do not mean third-personal but more specifically, whether reference to persons is eliminable.
Whereas Kant argued that a subject was a formal requirement for thoughts to be had at all, Cassam’s conclusion is rather that a substantial subject is required. There needs lo be a subjycl in uider lor an i-lhouyhl lo be a genuine "self-ascriptive, subject-predicate thought.”28 The “I” needs to refer to
something, namely, a person or subject. Cassam has notable predecessors, such as Evans, who were also prepared to argue that T entails a substantive subject.29 So although Kant and Cassam agree that thoughts entail subjects, they differ considerably in their reasons for why this is so and in what sense a
25 Dennett [1992], p177-78 26 Cassam [1992], p370 27 ibid
28 ibid, p365
subject is required. Given these differences, we should consider the consequences of Kant’s and Cassam’s arguments for Parfit separately.
4. Parfit and Cassam.
If Cassam is right, how can Parfit retain his claim that it is possible to specify the thinker of an ‘I’ thought without reference to persons? The key is that Cassam’s requirement to specify the thinker of a thought can be met solely by subjects-at-a-time, without the need to specify persons. This can be shown by reconsidering some of Parfit’s thought experiments. Imagine someone is in the duplicating teletransporter, which has developed further faults. It not only does not destroy the original person, it also sends two copies on to outer space. Just before losing consciousness in the booth, X thinks "I am cold”. On waking up, she and her two copies, Y and Z all think, “so I’ll put on a jumper”. Cassam’s key claim was that “in order to know what the thought is one must know who the thinker is’’.3o in this case, it is true that we know the thinker of “I am cold” is X, and X, Y and Z are all thinkers of the type-identical thoughts, “So I’ll put on a jumper”. Here, we have specified the substantial subjects-at-a-time of the thoughts in question. The problem here is that we still don’t necessarily know which persons are the subjects of these thoughts, as it is precisely the point of such thought experiments to show that there is a problem of personal identity in such cases. This would be especially true if X had been destroyed and only the replicas remained. There is no such problem of the identity of the substantial subjects-at-a-time of each thought. The fact that there is a mystery concerning which persons are present doesn’t prevent us from being able to locate and pick out the substantial subjects-at-a-time involved.
The force of Cassam’s point that "in order to know what the thought is one must know who the thinker is" can in this way be somewhat weakened. Certainly, in order to know what the thought is we need to know that it has a
subject. But the subject of thought can be located, and thus the content of the thought known, without knowledge of which person is having the thought. For example, in the teletransportation case, we need to decide which, if any, of the pre- and post teletransportation subjects-at-a-time are stages in the life of a single person in order to attribute the thought to a particular person. But before we do this we are able to know the content of the thought, as we are able to pinpoint the substantial subject at the time of the thinking of the thought. We can thus fully specify the content of each occurrence of the thought “So I’ll put on a jumper” without reference to persons. As long as we know the subject of each thought, X,Y or Z, we know enough.
In this way, the sense of "subject” which Cassam’s argument requires is something less than that of a fully-fledged person. A subject is here simply the substantial being which has the thought at a particular time. But the concept of a person involves the way in which a being’s existence extends over time. This opens up room for the impersonal description of persons Parfit requires. A person can be described as a certain series of substantial subjects-at-a-time. So l-thoughts do not entail anything about the substantive persons we are.
The case of fission makes the point even more clearly. Strawson discusses this case and labels the person who splits P and the two resulting persons p i and P2. From the inside, both pi and p2 will be forced to see themselves as the same person as P. But we know that they cannot both be the same person as
P.31 If we are to attempt, as the rationalist does, to make substantive judgments
about our identity over time merely because of the form of our thoughts, we will conclude that because we think we are the same as the original person, we are the same as that person. Strawson neatly highlights this error by imagining P1 and P2 both saying in unison;
The rational psychologist is right! On the inside one does detect the
31 S ee § 2.3 for the reasons why both fission products cannot be identical with the pre-fission person.
asymmetry, for I know that I am P and my opposite number is not. 32
In this case too, even if we know the substantive subjects-at-a-time of the various thoughts are P, P1 and P2, we don't yet know whether these three subjects are one, two or three separate persons. In this way, the concept of a subject-at-a-time is more basic than that of a person, and the knowledge of oneself as subject does not provide any further knowledge of oneself as a person. This is shown by the fact that P, P1 and pz all know which thoughts they are the subjects of, but they can still be mistaken over which person they are. So to say “P is subject of thought T ' is an impersonal description in the sense that P need only be described as a subject of thought and not as a person. This makes it impersonal in the strict sense of “without reference to persons”, rather than third-personal.
This response requires giving up the idea of thoughts as ontologically independent, but it still allows for an impersonal description of persons. The key features of Parfitianism can survive this revision. It would still be possible to account for a unified mental life over time in terms of psychological connectedness and continuity, but it would now be in terms of connections between subjects-at-a-time rather than individual thoughts and events. Furthermore, this psychological relation between subjects-at-a-time is different from the identity relation, as is shown by the fact that it would hold in the fission example above. Nothing of importance is lost by talking about psychological connectedness and continuity between subjects-at-a-time rather than individual thoughts, but rather more credibility is gained.
Although I believe this is a tenable response to Cassam, why not go further