Abstract

My real intention, however, is not to praise Wilson but to harry him. His argument seeks to give us substances, concrete individuals, without the prop of a Lockean substrate and without the Humean stigma of reducibility to bundles of properties. Wilson explicitly aims at doing justice in his doctrine to our rather hazy ordinary beliefs about individuals. He writes: "Goodman's language is remote from our ordinary ways of looking at the world and our ordinary ways of speaking about it. At the risk of being subsequently hoist with my own petard I should be inclined to suggest that these ordinary ways should be treated with respect and, if possible, vindicated. At any rate we may quite properly be suspicious of gratuitous and unnecessary departures from our common sense views." Here Wilson stands in the tradition of Aristotle's attempt to resolve puzzles about common sense concepts and so to forestall the motivation for a revisionary metaphysics like Plato's. And much more blatantly than does the De Anima account of souls as simply the forms of organisms, Wilson's treatment of substances succeeds in distorting important differences in our ways of thought about personal identity and about non-personal identity. Without ignoring the fact that non-personal individuals themselves form a heterogeneous class from an identifier's point of view, I do suggest that certain identification puzzles about people and near-people tend to diverge sharply from those about things and near-things. Anthony Flew has brought out several quite peculiar difficulties concerning 'same person' in a paper on 'Locke and Personal Identity'. For instance, the problem of finding criteria for personal identity, as Flew commends Locke for showing, is quite crucial to questions about the concepts of fair reward and punishment and about the notion of 'survival.' Recall the obvious: it is people and near-people that we worry about both as having the possibility of a reincarnation or hereafter--be it theological, theosophical or parapsychological--and as being the proper recipients of praise and blame. Insofar as we worry about dogs, ships and ideals in these respects they are treated as what I call 'near-people.' Insofar as people do not invite such queries they are 'near-things.' Locke's probe into the logical grammar of personal identity points to common sense intuitions about individuals which Wilson here and elsewhere has contrived to slur over. Of course such apparent intuitions may lead to error or even nonsense, but let us for the moment cleave to Wilson's intention of vindicating them.