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 experiments. The thought experiments 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 experiments 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 experiment 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.