Refining the primitivist’s position

Can we now conclude that Anti-Criterialism, and therefore the primitivist’s Further Fact View, is done for? Well, not quite. It depends on the relation between C1 and C2. Recall that the Criterialist holds that C1 (identity consists in other facts) and C2 (there are necessary and sufficient conditions for identity) are true. Taking that as our definition, an Anti-Criterialist will then be someone who thinks that at least one of those claims is false. The preceding line of argument counts against someone who thinks that C2 is false. But

this will only count against Anti-Criterialism per se if rejecting C1 commits one to rejecting C2. If it is possible to reject C1 but affirm C2, the Anti-Criterialist will be able to avoid the objections above.

What is the relation between C1 and C2 then? There is, I think, something intuitive about the idea that C1 and C2 are biconditionally related. The intuition might go something like this. If on the one hand you hold that the relation of identity does not consist in any other relation, then surely the most you can say is that identity is necessary and sufficient for persistence. You won’t be able to supply any non-trivial necessary and sufficient conditions – in which case not-C1 entails not-C2; and so C2 entails C1. This appears to be the sort of reasoning Sydney Shoemaker is employing when he says:

The diachronic unity relation cannot be simple and unanalysable if its obtaining requires spatio-temporal continuity or connectedness. (Shoemaker 2012: 129)

As I understand it, to say the diachronic unity relation is simple and unanalysable is to say that it does not consist in anything other than itself. If that’s right, then Shoemaker is saying that someone who thinks that spatio-temporal continuity is necessary for persistence must also think that persistence consists in something other than itself. So by Shoemaker’s lights, if there are necessary conditions for persistence, then persistence will consist in something other than itself. That is, Shoemaker thinks that C2 entails C1. If on the other hand you hold that the fact of a person’s persistence consists in other facts, then surely you will also hold that the obtaining of those other facts will be necessary and sufficient for that person’s persistence. For example, if you think that one’s persistence consists in the existence of a series of persons with whom one is physically continuous and/or connected, it might seem to follow that you will hold physical continuity to be necessary and sufficient for persistence. If that’s the case, C1 entails C2. Intuitively, then, there is a case for supposing that C1 and C2 are biconditionally related. I take it that this intuition, or something like it, is demonstrated by the tendency to lump C1 and C2 together; and that it is further demonstrated by the Criterialists’ apparent assumption that refuting Anti-Criterialism can be achieved simply by showing why C2 is indispensable. This intuition should not be trusted, however. For starters, as Olson (2012) warns, ‘[p]erhaps our identity over time could consist in something that is not expressible in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions’ (2012: 49). The suggestion here is that C1

could be true and yet C2 be false, casting doubt on the conditional C1→C2. I do not want to spend any time considering how this might work; the relation we are really interested in is not the biconditional itself; what we particularly want to know is whether the conditional C2→C1 is true. If this conditional is false, the Anti-Criterialist will be able to reject Criterialism by accepting C2 but rejecting C1; and, in accepting C2, will be immune to the Criterialist’s epistemological objections considered above.

In saying that persistence does not consist in anything else, one is saying that, whenever it is a fact that a person persists, this fact is not made true by any other facts. That the person persists is a ‘brute’ or ‘primitive’ fact. Now, there does not appear to be any contradiction in the thought that, even though this fact is brute, it nevertheless always happens to be accompanied by certain other facts, such as the holding of particular empirical relations. This would amount to the view that personal persistence is brute but that it has necessary conditions attached. And further, there does not seem to be any contradiction in the thought that, in addition, there are no instances when these other facts obtain but the brute fact of persistence doesn’t. This would mean that these other facts are sufficient for persistence. Thus, someone who believed all these things would be a primitivist who believes there to be necessary and sufficient conditions for persistence. There is logical space for someone to reject C1 but accept C2.

Indeed, the reason that Criterialists need to insist on C1 in addition to C2 is that philosophers are not simply interested in what evidence we use to judge that personal identity obtains; they want to know what makes it the case that personal identity obtains (Olson 2012). If we knew what the necessary and sufficient conditions for personal identity were, we would be in a position to make identity judgements. If we knew that, say, physical continuity was necessary and sufficient for persistence, we would know that whenever physical continuity doesn’t obtain neither does identity; and whenever physical continuity does obtain, so identity does too. So we would be able to say that the person we are observing now is the same person we were observing some time ago. But we wouldn’t merely in virtue of that be able to say why the person we are now observing is the same person we were observing before. This is because the biconditional contained in C2 is symmetrical: if physical continuity (for example) is necessary and sufficient for personal identity, then personal identity is also necessary and sufficient for physical continuity. Hence, C2 could be true and it nevertheless be the case that personal identity does not consist in physical continuity; it might instead be the case that physical

continuity consists in personal identity. Or perhaps personal identity and physical continuity aren’t related by a grounding relation at all. Hence, C2 does not entail C1. All C2 tells us is that there is a correlation. We need C1 to impose an explanational asymmetry on the correlation; we need C1 in order to say what grounds persistence. Since C2 does not entail C1, the epistemological objections we discussed earlier that were levelled against Anti-Criterialism are not effective against Anti-Criterialism per se, but rather against a specific variety of Anti-Criterialism – namely, that which rejects C2. Admittedly, this Anti-Criterialist view is the one we typically find populating the literature. But if we are to follow the definition of Anti-Criterialism stipulated by the authors at the beginning of this chapter, we must recognise there is space for an Anti- Criterialist to accept C2 whilst rejecting C1; an Anti-Criterialist can be a primitivist who holds that brute facts can have necessary and sufficient conditions. This Anti-Criterialist is immune to the criticisms examined so far. That is not to say the view does not face other difficulties – we will get to those in the following sections. But it just means that the Criterialist’s objections considered so far are only half the story.

From here on in, I will be assuming that the primitivist accepts the existence of necessary and sufficient conditions for persistence. For ease of exposition, then, I will use the term ‘primitivist’ to refer to the Anti-Criterialist who denies C1 but accepts C2. There are two arguments I want to make against such a view. Firstly is a general concern about theoretical simplicity. Secondly is the question of why we should believe that identity has necessary and sufficient conditions if it consists in no other facts.