Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Abstract₁

1. In Chapter IX, I try to show that the philosophical demise of personal identity as generated by Parfit was misguided from the beginning because of his careless use of thought experiments². The thought experiments³ devised by Parfit have unfortunately shaped the direction of much of the recent discussion on the problem of personal identity.
2. I do not claim that thought experiments⁴ should be banned in the analysis of concepts. For example, the discussions emerging from Putnam's 'Brain-in-a-Vat' and Searle's 'Chinese Room' experiments have been very fruitful. However, one must not let the thought experiment⁵ lose significant contact with the background conditions that serve as the context for the phenomenon under consideration.
3. I contend that Parfit is guilty of this error. Of course, the point of using imaginative variation in respect to the properties of a phenomenon being investigated is to gain a better understanding of the nature of the phenomenon. But this cannot be accomplished if the background conditions are arbitrarily varied as well.