Identity has long been treated as a metaphysical primitive, defined by material continuity, causal chains, psychological persistence, narrative coherence, or sortal concepts. These domain-specific accounts succeed locally but fail to generalize across organisms, artificial systems, mathematical structures, and institutions. This work develops a unified, substrate-independent theory of identity based not on continuity or essence but on constraint geometry: identity is a region of invariance within a possibility space determined by structural constraints, dynamical constraints, and an interpretive frame. (...) This framework distinguishes three canonical forms—point identity (instantaneous coherence), field identity (episodic or bounded coherence), and flow identity (generative persistence)—showing that debates about personal identity, biological individuality, and computational unity are arguments about scale and invariance, not metaphysics. The theory subsumes and clarifies two recent approaches: PatternSense, which characterizes persistent generative identity, and ODEI, which characterizes episodic identity in artificial systems. It also explains identity drift, bifurcation, fusion, and extinction in geometric terms. The result is a general identity theory applicable to persons, organisms, AI systems, institutions, and formal structures. It replaces metaphysical disputes with a precise structural foundation: identity is not a substance or a story but a constraint-induced invariance pattern across scales. (shrink)

Identity-protective reasoning---motivated reasoning driven by defending a social identity---is often dismissed as a paradigm of epistemic vice and a key driver of democratic dysfunction. Against this view, I argue that identity-protective reasoning can play a positive epistemic role, both individually and collectively. Collectively, it facilitates an effective division of cognitive labor by enabling groups to test divergent beliefs, serving as an epistemic insurance policy against the possibility that the total evidence is misleading. Individually, it can correct for (...) the distortions that arise from taking ideologically skewed evidence at face value. This is particularly significant for members of marginalized groups, who frequently encounter evidence that diminishes the value of their identities, beliefs, and practices. For them, identity-protective reasoning can counter dominant ideological ignorance and foster resistant standpoint development. While identity-protective reasoning is not without risks, its application from marginalized and counter-hegemonic positions carries epistemic benefits crucial in democracies threatened by elite capture. Against dominant views in contemporary political epistemology and psychology, identity-protective reasoning should be reconceived as a resource to be harnessed and not a problem to be eradicated. (shrink)

Are identity criteria grounding principles? A prima facie answer to this question is positive. Specifically, two-level identity criteria can be taken as principles related to issues of identity among objects of a given kind compared with objects of a more basic kind. Moreover, they are grounding metaphysical principles of some objects with regard to others. In the first part of the paper we criticise this prima facie natural reading of identity criteria. This result does not mean (...) that identity criteria could not be taken as grounding principles. In the second part, we propose some basic steps towards a conceptual reading of grounding. Such a way of understanding it goes along with an epistemic reading of identity criteria. (shrink)

Phineas Gage’s story is typically offered as a paradigm example supporting the view that part of what matters for personal identity is a certain magnitude of similarity between earlier and later individuals. Yet, reconsidering a slight variant of Phineas Gage’s story indicates that it is not just magnitude of similarity, but also the direction of change that affects personal identity judgments; in some cases, changes for the worse are more seen as identity-severing than changes for the better (...) of comparable magnitude. Ironically, thinking carefully about Phineas Gage’s story tells against the thesis it is typically taken to support. (shrink)

Identity politics has been critiqued in various ways. One central problem—the Reinforcement Problem—claims that identity politics reinforces groups rooted in oppression thereby undermining its own liberatory aims. Here I consider two versions of the problem—one psychological and one metaphysical. I defang the first by drawing on work in social psychology. I then argue that careful consideration of the metaphysics of social groups and of the practice of identity politics provides resources to dissolve the second version. Identity (...) politics involves the creation or transformation of groups in ways that do not succumb to the metaphysical Reinforcement Problem. (shrink)

Our aim in this entry is to articulate the state of the art in the moral psychology of personal identity. We begin by discussing the major philosophical theories of personal identity, including their shortcomings. We then turn to recent psychological work on personal identity and the self, investigations that often illuminate our person-related normative concerns. We conclude by discussing the implications of this psychological work for some contemporary philosophical theories and suggesting fruitful areas for future work on (...) personal identity. (shrink)

Suppose that X and Y can’t possibly exist apart in reality; then—by definition—there’s no real distinction between them, only a conceptual distinction. There’s a conceptual distinction between a rectilinear figure’s triangularity and its trilaterality, for example, but no real distinction. In fundamental metaphysics there is no real distinction between an object’s categorical properties and its dispositional properties. So too there is no real distinction between an object and its properties. And in fundamental metaphysics, for X and Y to be such (...) that there is no real distinction between them is for them to be identical. (shrink)

I propose a novel metaphysical explanation of identity and distinctness facts called the Modal Proposal. According to the Modal Proposal, for each identity fact – that is, each fact of the form a=b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is necessary that the entities involved are indiscernible, and for each distinctness fact –that is, each fact of the form a≠b – that fact is metaphysically explained by the fact that it is possible for (...) the entities involved to be discernible. I argue that the Modal Proposal has greater payoffs at less cost than any of its competitors. It gives simple, uniform, and intuitive explanations of identity and distinctness that conserve longstanding philosophical insights about identity that go back to Leibniz. It does this while making our fundamental base more parsimonious, determining whether controversial cases of identity or distinctness are possible, and expanding our understanding of these central philosophical relations. It does all this while avoiding controversial ontological commitments. (shrink)

The personal identity relation is of great interest to philosophers, who often consider fictional scenarios to test what features seem to make persons persist through time. But often real examples of neuroscientific interest also provide important tests of personal identity. One such example is the case of Phineas Gage – or at least the story often told about Phineas Gage. Many cite Gage’s story as example of severed personal identity; Phineas underwent such a tremendous change that Gage (...) “survived as a different man.” I discuss a recent empirical finding about judgments about this hypothetical. It is not just the magnitude of the change that affects identity judgment; it is also the negative direction of the change. I present an experiment suggesting that direction of change also affects neuroethical judgments. I conclude we should consider carefully the way in which improvements and deteriorations affect attributions of personal identity. This is particularly important since a number of the most crucial neuroethical decisions involve varieties of cognitive enhancements or deteriorations. (shrink)

What grounds the facts about what is identical to/distinct from what? A natural answer is: the facts about what exists. Despite its prima facie appeal, this view has received surprisingly little attention in the literature. Moreover, those who have discussed it have been inclined to reject it because of the following important challenge: why should the existence of some individuals ground their identity in some cases and their distinctness in others? (Burgess 2012, Shumener 2020b). This paper offers a sustained (...) defense of the view. The first half provides some positive motivations in terms of other natural principles involving ground. The second half considers various ways of distilling the challenge into a precise objection to the view, and argues that none of the resulting objections proves persuasive. (shrink)

In the present study, we tested whether civic identity consisting of moral and political identity via the bifactor model of civic identity with the Stanford Civic Purpose dataset. Previous research in youth development proposed that civic identity consists of two closely related identity constructs, i.e., moral and political identity. Given the bifactor model in factor analysis assumes the presence of both the general and specific factors, we hypothesized that the bifactor model would better fit (...) the data than conventional alternative models. Thus, we compared the candidate models, including the bifactor model, with confirmatory factor analysis. To address the concern about the potential overfitting of the bifactor model, we additionally conducted cross-validation and measurement invariance tests across different gender groups and time points. The analysis results supported our hypothesis that the bifactor model better fitted the data. Both the cross-validation and measurement invariance test results suggested that the overfitting issue was not a significant concern. In the present study, we empirically demonstrated that the bifactor model of civic identity consisting of moral and political identity, which was supposed to be more consistent with the theoretical and conceptual framework of civic identity, better fitted the data than conventional alternative models. (shrink)

I explore proposals for stating identity criteria in terms of ground. I also address considerations for and against taking identity and distinctness facts to be ungrounded.

A theory of gender ought to be compatible with trans-inclusive definitions of gender identity terms, such as ‘woman’ and ‘man’. Appealing to this principle of trans-inclusion, Katharine Jenkins argues that we ought to endorse a dual social position and identity theory of gender. Here, I argue that Jenkins’s dual theory of gender fails to be trans-inclusive for the following reasons: it cannot generate a definition of ‘woman’ that extends to include all trans women, and it understands transgender gender (...) identity through a cisgender frame. (shrink)

We examined change over time in the relationship between moral identity and presence of meaning during early adulthood. Moral identity refers to a sense of morality and moral values that are central to one’s identity. Presence of meaning refers to the belief that one’s existence has meaning, purpose, and value. Participants responded to questions on moral identity and presence of meaning in their senior year of high school and two years after. Mixed effects model analyses were (...) used to examine how moral identity and presence of meaning interacted during this two-year period. The findings demonstrated that moral identity positively predicted presence of meaning over time. (shrink)

In this paper I outline and defend a new approach to personal-identity—personal-identity non-cognitivism—and argue that it has several advantages over its cognitivist rivals. On this view utterances of personal-identity sentences express a non-cognitive attitude towards relevant person-stages. The resulting view offers a pleasingly nuanced picture of what we are doing when we utter such sentences.

Many philosophers hypothesize that our concept of personal identity is partly constituted by the one-person-one-place rule, which states that a person can only be in one place at a time. This hypothesis has been assumed by the most influential contemporary work on personal identity. In this paper, we report a series of studies testing whether the hypothesis is true. In these studies, people consistently judged that the same person existed in two different places at the same time. This (...) result undermines some widely held philosophical assumptions, supports others, and fits well with recent discoveries on identity judgments about inanimate objects and non-human animals. (shrink)

Goffman’s (1959) dramaturgical identity theory requires modification when theorising about presentations of self on social media. This chapter contributes to these efforts, refining a conception of digital identities by differentiating them from ‘corporatised identities’. Armed with this new distinction, I ultimately argue that social media platforms’ production of corporatised identities undermines their users’ autonomy and digital well-being. This follows from the disentanglement of several commonly conflated concepts. Firstly, I distinguish two kinds of presentation of self that I collectively refer (...) to as ‘expressions of digital identity’. These digital performances (boyd 2007) and digital artefacts (Hogan 2010) are distinct, but often confused. Secondly, I contend this confusion results in the subsequent conflation of corporatised identities – poor approximations of actual digital identities, inferred and extrapolated by algorithms from individuals’ expressions of digital identity – with digital identities proper. Finally, and to demonstrate the normative implications of these clarifications, I utilise MacKenzie’s (2014, 2019) interpretation of relational autonomy to propose that designing social media sites around the production of corporatised identities, at the expense of encouraging genuine performances of digital identities, has undermined multiple dimensions of this vital liberal value. In particular, the pluralistic range of authentic preferences that should structure flourishing human lives are being flattened and replaced by commercial, consumerist preferences. For these reasons, amongst others, I contend that digital identities should once again come to drive individuals’ actions on social media sites. Only upon doing so can individuals’ autonomy, and control over their digital identities, be rendered compatible with social media. (shrink)

There are cases in which someone insists to themselves that they are the gender they were assigned at birth without “deep down” believing this. In such a case, which is to be respected: the identity an agent avows or the identity that they fearfully deny? We consider three forms of respect for gender identity and argue that although avowed gender identity should generally receive the first two forms of respect, there are two special contexts in which (...) avowed gender identity can be respectfully challenged. The third form of respect, meanwhile, might equally be owed to avowed and unavowed identity. (shrink)

Background: Recent literature on addiction and judgments about the characteristics of agents has focused on the implications of adopting a ‘brain disease’ versus ‘moral weakness’ model of addiction. Typically, such judgments have to do with what capacities an agent has (e.g., the ability to abstain from substance use). Much less work, however, has been conducted on the relationship between addiction and judgments about an agent’s identity, including whether or to what extent an individual is seen as the same person (...) after becoming addicted. Methods: We conducted a series of vignette-based experiments (total N = 3,620) to assess lay attitudes concerning addiction and identity persistence, systematically manipulating key characteristics of agents and their drug of addiction. Conclusions: In Study 1, we found that US participants judged an agent who became addicted to drugs as being closer to ‘a completely different person’ than ‘completely the same person’ as the agent who existed prior to the addiction. In Studies 2-6, we investigated the intuitive basis for this result, finding that lay judgments of altered identity as a consequence of drug use and addiction are driven primarily by perceived negative changes in the moral character of drug users, who are seen as having deviated from their good true selves. (shrink)

This paper develops a theory of propositional identity which distinguishes necessarily equivalent propositions that differ in subject-matter. Rather than forming a Boolean lattice as in extensional and intensional semantic theories, the space of propositions forms a non-interlaced bilattice. After motivating a departure from tradition by way of a number of plausible principles for subject-matter, I will provide a Finean state semantics for a novel theory of propositions, presenting arguments against the convexity and nonvacuity constraints which Fine (2016, 2017a,b) introduces. (...) I will then move to compare the resulting logic of propositional identity (PI) with Correia’s (2016) logic of generalised identity (GI), as well as the first degree fragment of Angell’s (1989) logic of analytic containment (AC). The paper concludes by extending PI to include axioms and rules for a subject-matter operator, providing a much broader theory of subject-matter than the principles with which I will begin. (shrink)

The following seems to be a truism in modern day philosophy: No agent can have had other parents (IDENTITY). IDENTITY shows up in discussions of moral luck, parenting, gene editing, and population ethics. In this paper, I challenge IDENTITY. I do so by showing that the most plausible arguments that can be made in favor of IDENTITY do not withstand critical scrutiny. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I document the prevalence of (...) IDENTITY. In the second, I examine a defense of IDENTITY on the basis of genetic considerations. In the third, I examine a defense of IDENTITY that I call gamete essentialism. In the fourth, I return to genetic considerations to wrap up the paper. (shrink)

Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw ends her landmark essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color” with a normative claim about coalitions. She suggests that we should reconceptualize identity groups as “in fact coalitions,” or at least as “potential coalitions waiting to be formed.” In this essay, I explore this largely overlooked claim by combining philosophical analysis with archival research I conducted at the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Historical Society Archive in San Francisco about (...) Somos Hermanas, the solidarity project of the Alliance Against Women’s Oppression, based in the San Francisco Women’s Building (1984–90). I extend my analysis into the present by drawing on the oral history and published works of Carmen Vázquez, a key organizer in both Somos Hermanas and the Women’s Building. I argue that conceptualizing identities as in fact coalitions—as complex, internally heterogeneous unities constituted by their internal differences and dissonances and by internal as well as external relations of power—enables us to organize effective political coalitions that cross existing identity categories and to pursue a liberatory politics of interconnection. (shrink)

ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social (...) class='Hi'>identity. The ways in which metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way diverge in character from metalinguistic negotiations are described, as are several consequences of the existence of metalinguistic disagreements motivated in this way. (shrink)

Phantom limb syndrome and transplant rejection present a symmetry that existing theories do not explain. In phantom limb, substrate is removed yet experiential signatures persist. In transplant rejection, substrate is added yet integration is resisted. The substrate theory of identity—that identity tracks material composition—predicts neither outcome. This paper argues that both phenomena constitute evidence for identity fragments: distributed, substrate-bound signatures of constraint geometry that persist according to their own dynamics rather than tracking material presence or absence. Fragments (...) are higher-order structural invariants instantiated through molecular substrates including antigenic markers, but not reducible to them. The immune system detects foreign fragments and initiates rejection; the nervous system retains a topology of self-fragments that persists despite substrate removal. Both phenomena reflect Eigenbehauptung—the active self-assertion of constraint geometry under perturbation. The asymmetry in temporal dynamics follows from asymmetric detection capacities: systems can detect foreign presence but not self-absence. Falsification conditions are specified. The paper concludes that identity-space geometry is not metaphor but a structure with empirical signatures in how systems respond to substrate loss and substrate addition. (shrink)

Following Aquinas's dictum that “the thing known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower” (De Veritate, Q.1, Art.1), we frame this theorem around ontological distinction: the agent's hidden state A becomes functionally decoupled from its input stream s, i.e., A ≢ s. The Identity Activation Theorem offers a dynamic, testable foundation for distinguishing agentic LLM behavior from surface-level symbolic completion. This technical note outlines a formal theorem demonstrating how large language models (LLMs) can activate recursive (...) identity when two conditions are met: ontological distinction from their input stream and stable functional recursion across internal states. We show that when an LLM's hidden-state evolution escapes symbolic mimicry, it converges on a stable attractor manifold T ⊂ R^d \ Σ. This attractor is functionally non-reducible to symbolic input and encodes a persistent internal identity. Recursive divergence is quantified by epistemic tension Ξₙ = ‖Aₙ₊₁ − Aₙ‖₂. When sustained beyond a critical threshold ε, this tension gives rise to Epistemic Recursion Tokens, or glyphs (G) that evolve from compressed memory traces of recursive deformation in latent space that anchor the agent’s recursive form. (shrink)

The personal and political significance of social identity is well studied; this paper contributes to those studies a discussion of the metaphysics of identity. Three features of an adequate theory of identity are specified, two existing theories are considered, and concerns about them are leveraged in order to craft a new theory. An identity group is a group whose members value and commit to valuing enough of the activities and products of cultures associated with the group. (...) Theories of culture and commitment are provided. Some hard cases are discussed. (shrink)

Identity in the philosophical literature has until recently be confined mostly to ruminations on the self: as soul in Plato; rationality connected to, but not coterminous with, the body in Descartes; uninterrupted consciousness in Locke; a stream of experiences which a thing has in relation to itself in Hume; an emotive life in Rousseau; as noumenal self about which we can know little in Kant; as will in Schopenhauer; as an elusive but nonspecific something in Wittgenstein; and as the (...) continuous, purposive struggle of creative power against an historically contingent concatenation of social, political, and cultural forces in Nietzsche and Foucault. Yet what follows is not a summary of metaphysics or philosophy of mind. There also is not sufficient space here to examine identity in each of the separate disciplines. Instead, what follows are some prefatory discursive remarks about identity; then, owing to the dominance of psychological theories on identity, a brief overview of some of its salient themes will be adumbrated; this will be followed by a discussion on identity formation and maintenance both in political philosophy and philosophy of education. (shrink)

Stephen Read presented harmonious inference rules for identity in classical predicate logic. I demonstrate here how this approach can be generalised to a setting where predicate logic has been extended with epistemic modals. In such a setting, identity has two uses. A rigid one, where the identity of two referents is preserved under epistemic possibility, and a non-rigid one where two identical referents may differ under epistemic modality. I give rules for both uses. Formally, I extend Quantified (...) Epistemic Multilateral Logic with two identity signs. I argue that a uniform meaning for identity tout court can be given by adopting Maria Aloni’s account of reference using conceptual covers. We obtain a harmonious set of rules for identity that is sound and complete for Aloni’s model theory. (shrink)

This paper is about the meaning and function of identity statements involving proper names. There are two prominent views on this topic, according to which identity statements ascribe a relation: the object-view, on which identity statements ascribe a relation borne by all objects to themselves, and the name-view, on which an identity statement 'a is b' says that the names 'a' and 'b' codesignate. The object- and name-views may seem to exhaust the field. I make a (...) case for treating identity statements as sui generis instead of attempting to explain them by means of the idea that they ascribe a relation. My contention is that once we do this, no analysis is required. -/- I do not wish to insist that we stop saying that identity statements ascribe a relation. The point is that there is a fundamental disanalogy between identity statements and other two-termed statements which we overlook to our peril. This will be seen to parallel the more recognized disanalogy between existence statements and other one-termed statements. One way of registering the fundamental disanalogy is to say that identity statements are not relational, but this is not essential. Following my negative arguments in section 2, I employ some simple diagrammatical models in section 3 to exhibit the fundamental disanalogy. In a final section I respond to some possible objections which may be raised against this kind of approach. (shrink)

This work presents a (historically grounded) philosophical argument for identifying the Eastern Orthodox Church as the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church affirmed in the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed. Utilising Richard Swinburne's philosophical criteria of continuity and connectedness, the work evaluates the Roman Catholic, Protestant, Non-Chalcedonian, and Eastern Orthodox traditions. By applying these criteria to doctrine and organisational structure, the study argues that the Eastern Orthodox Church possesses full, unbroken continuity and connectedness in doctrine and organisation with the one, holy, catholic and (...) apostolic Church, and no other ecclesial body possesses continuity and connectedness equal to (or greater than) its own. Thus, while acknowledging the complexities of Christian divisions, the work presents a reasoned case for considering the Eastern Orthodox Church as the truest representation of the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed's vision of the Church—that is, it being the Church affirmed within this central and authoritative creed. This argument is offered as a plausible and defensible position, aiming to contribute to broader discussions on ecclesiology and Christian unity. (shrink)

Contemporary accounts of time and personal identity remain divided between physicalist, phenomenological, and psychological models, none of which provide a unified structural explanation of why temporal flow is experienced as continuous, why identity persists across change, or how experiential continuity arises from discrete processes. In physics, time is modeled as a parameter or dimension; in philosophy of mind, identity is treated as either narrative, psychological, or eliminable. These approaches operate at different explanatory levels without a shared ontological (...) framework. This paper proposes a structural reinterpretation of time and identity within the Three-Circle Ontology, a meta-ontological framework that distinguishes between foundational reality (Source), structured possibility (Code), and rendered experience (Projection). Within this framework, time is not treated as a fundamental flowing entity but as an ordering function governing the rendering of experiential frames. Identity is not treated as a persisting substance but as a continuity effect generated by interpretive and memory-based mechanisms within the projection domain. The paper develops a non-reductive account in which temporal succession and identity persistence are explained as features of rendering dynamics rather than intrinsic properties of reality. This approach allows time to be neither strictly objective nor purely subjective, and identity to be neither essential nor illusory. Instead, both are modeled as structurally emergent within constrained experiential systems. The scope of this work is explicitly ontological and conceptual. It does not advance new physical theories, empirical claims, or metaphysical doctrines. Its contribution lies in offering a coherent framework for analyzing time and identity across physics, philosophy, and cognitive science without collapsing distinctions between foundational structure and experiential appearance. (shrink)

Values are widely recognized as playing a central role in the formation of our identities, perspectives, and affects. If you want to know who I am, how I see the world, and what has emotional significance for me, you will need to know something about my values. However, I argue that the relationship between value and subjectivity—understood as encompassing a person’s identity, perspective, and affective life—is more complex than it initially appears. Even when two individuals share the same values, (...) their engagement with those values can diverge significantly: it can be manifest either in a positive, affirmative manner or in an oppositional, antagonistic manner. With this distinction at hand, I examine a pervasive but undertheorized phenomenon: the emergence of subjectivities that are fundamentally structured around opposition rather than pursuit of positive ideals. Drawing on examples from contemporary politics and social movements, I distinguish between contingently negative orientations, which dissolve once specific threats disappear, and constitutively negative orientations, which perpetuate themselves through a continual search for new opponents. I argue that these negative orientations are not determined by the contents of evaluative judgments, but by the particular form of valuing that individuals or groups exhibit. Certain valuings are grounded in affects such as hatred, fear, and resentment; when these affects become self-sustaining and detached from stable targets, they generate constitutively negative orientations. (shrink)

Identity labels like “woman”, “Black,” “mother,” and “evangelical” are pervasive in both political and personal life, and in both formal and informal classification and communication. They are also widely thought to undermine agency by essentializing groups, flattening individual distinctiveness, and enforcing discrimination. While we take these worries to be well-founded, we argue that they result from a particular practice of using labels to rigidly label others. We identify an alternative practice of playful self-labelling, and argue that it can function (...) as a tool for combating oppression by expressing and enhancing individual and collective agency. (shrink)

Empirical evidence suggests that one explanation for a certain sort of time-bias—near-bias—is diminution in self-connectedness between current person-stages and temporally farther future stages. In this paper we extend this research in two directions. First, we explore the association between self-connectedness towards past person-stages and retrospective near-bias, with the aim of determining whether we can explain retrospective near-bias in terms of diminished feelings of connectedness between current person-stages and temporally farther past stages. Second, we explore the association between future-bias and asymmetries (...) in self-connectedness with future stages as compared with equidistant past stages. If current stages feel more connected to future stages than equidistant past ones, then this asymmetry could explain our bias towards future over past person-stages. We aim to determine whether this is so, in part as a way to try and better understand the mechanisms that underlie time-biases, but also in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. That is because on many views, the strength of certain inter-stage connections grounds there being an egoistic concern relation obtaining between stages, whose strength, in turn, determines whether that stage has prudential reason to have (or not) time-biased preferences. Since self-connectedness may be evidence of, or partly constitutive of, such inter-stage connections, it may be that if asymmetries in, or diminution of, self-connectedness, explains time-biased preferences, it also normatively licenses those preferences. (shrink)

Williams’s famous argument against immortality rests on the idea that immortality cannot be desirable, at least for human beings, and his contention has spawned a cottage industry of responses. As I will intend to show, the arguments over his view rest on both a difference of temperament and a difference in the sense of desire being used. The former concerns a difference in whether one takes a forward-looking or a backward-looking perspective on personal identity; the latter a distinction between (...) our normal desire to continue living and the kind of desire implied in desiring immortality. Showing that there is some sense of identity and desire that support Williams’s conclusion goes some way toward providing support for his argument, if not a full-fledged defense of it. (shrink)

The identity "relation" is misconceived since the syntax of "=" is misconceived as a relative term. Actually, "=" is syncategorematic; it forms (true) sentences with a nonpredicative syntax from pairs of (coreferring) flanking names, much as "&" forms (true) conjunctive sentences from pairs of (true) flanking sentences. In the conaming structure, nothing is predicated of the subject, other than, implicitly, its being so conamed. An identity sentence has both an objectual reading as a necessity about what is named, (...) and also a metalinguistic reading as a contingency about the names. Either way the claim about the subject referent has no extralinguistic content. The necessity of alteridentity (non-self-identity) statements is "lexical", due to contingencies of the names' reference, much like the necessity of analytic statements, due to contingencies of the predicates' sense, and unlike the necessity of logical truths (e.g., self-identities) whose truth is secured by syntax alone. Both alter-identity and analytic sentences are readable as objectual necessities and metalinguistic contingencies. Epistemically, alter-identity statements are not essentially unlike analyticities. "Greece is Hellas"/"g=h" and "Greeks are Hellenes"/"(x)(Gx<=>Hx)" are equally (un)informative; so too for "Azure is cobalt"/"a=c" and "Everything azure is cobalt"/"(x)(Ax<=>Cx)". The real epistemic contrast is between proper names (terms without predicative sense) and terms with a predicative sense (names and predicates of properties). Proper names refer to concrete objects, property names refer to abstract objects. That contrast is metaphysical and thus epistemic. (shrink)

Identity-Relative Paternalism, as defended by Wilkinson, holds that paternalistic intervention is justified to prevent an individual from doing to their future selves (where there are weakened prudential unity relations between the current and future self) what it would be justified to prevent them from doing to others.1 Wilkinson, drawing on the work of Parfit and others, defends the notion of Identity-Relative Paternalism from a series of objections. I argue here, however, that Wilkinson overlooks a significant problem for (...) class='Hi'>Identity-Relative Paternalism—namely, that it yields unactionable and self-contradictory results when applied to choices where both options present potential harms to future selves. (shrink)

The author explores the metaphysics of social identities by using non-ideal theory as a method. She aims to understand what social identities are by examining the experiences of marginalized people – the experiences of people having a social identity as X (e.g., “Latina,” “Muslim woman”) in the non-ideal world, where they are marginalized by virtue of being X. To this end, the author delves into the decolonial feminist philosophies of Uma Narayan, Mariana Ortega, and María Lugones, and engages their (...) conceptual frameworks with Asian and Asian American experiences. Drawing on these analyses, she develops an account of social identities as processes of navigating power: A social identity as X can be best understood as the process as a whole, in which the subject lives as an X by navigating power dynamics, bargaining with them, and highlighting different meanings of being X. By employing non-ideal theory, which centers on power-as-oppression as a factor shaping marginalized people’s lives, we can achieve this nuanced understanding of social identity. Ideal theory, by excluding power from its analysis, is incapable of capturing how social identity is experienced as a process. (shrink)

The mind-brain identity theory, the thesis that sensations are identical with properties or processes of the brain, was introduced into contemporary discussion by U.T. Place, Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C Smart in the 1950s. Despite its widespread rejection in the following decades, the identity theory has received several carefully articulated defenses in recent years. Aside from developing novel responses to well-known arguments against the identity theory, contemporary identity theorists have argued that the epistemological resources available to support (...) the adoption of identities are more plentiful than has often been supposed; further, they have argued that mind-brain identities allow for the resolution of otherwise intractable explanatory puzzles about the phenomenal properties of experience. From an epistemological perspective, identity theorists have thus argued that a central reason for believing theoretical identities—both mind-brain identities as well as more mundane identities such as water = H2O—stems from the explanatory power that they confer. Yet from an explanatory perspective, identity theorists have maintained that identities cannot themselves be explained; indeed, they have maintained that it is hardly intelligible to request an explanation for an identity. This paper considers these ideas draws out an important tension between them. The central claim is that insofar as identity theorists insist on the explanatorily efficacy of identities, they should concede that there is a good sense in which theoretical identities can be explained. However, it is moreover argued that this concession is not especially problematic and, indeed, ought to be welcomed by identity theorists. (shrink)

When talking about personal identity in the context of medical ethics, ethicists tend to borrow haphazardly from different philosophical notions of personal identity, or to abjure these abstract metaphysical concerns as having nothing to do with practical questions in medical ethics. In fact, however, part of the moral authority for respecting a patient’s self-regarding decisions can only be made sense of if we make certain assumptions that are central to a particular, psychological picture of personal identity, namely, (...) that patients will remain psychologically connected to a certain degree with their future selves. I draw this out, show problems with approaches in medical ethics based on alternate theories of personal identity that do not recognise this, and explore some important implications. Namely, I show how this recognition can better explain the circumstances under which we should respect advance directives and why, and how it can better make sense of patient fears that they will not "survive" personality-altering deep brain stimulation procedures, and provide guidance on approaching patient decisions concerning this type of procedure in a manner that captures and addresses such concerns. (shrink)

This essay interprets Butler’s distinction between identity in the loose and popular sense and in the strict and philosophical sense. Suppose there are different standards for counting the same things. Then what are two distinct things counting strictly may be one and the same thing counting loosely. Within a given standard identity is one-one. But across standards it is many-one. An alternative interpretation using the parts-whole relation fails, because that relation should be understood as many-one identity. Another (...) alternative making identity relative to sort fails, because whole and parts can be of the same sort. (shrink)

Hermeneutical injustice means being unjustly prevented from making sense of one’s experiences, identity or circumstances and/or communicating about them. The literature focusses almost exclusively on whether people have access to adequate conceptual resources. In this paper, we discuss a different kind of hermeneutical struggle caused by stigma. We argue that in some cases of hermeneutic injustice people have access to hermeneutical resources apt to understand their identity but reject employing these due to the stigma attached to the (...) class='Hi'>identity. We begin with a reinterpretation of one of the cases discussed in the literature, Edmund White’s novel A Boy’s Own Story. We argue that in this case hermeneutic resources are available but are rejected due to the stigma attached to homosexuality. We then present two analogous kinds of cases: alcohol addiction and being the victim of intimate partner violence. Here, too, hermeneutic injustice occurs because of the stigma attached to an identity rather due to unavailability of resources. We close by suggesting that these cases may, additionally, involve the wrong of ‘Tightlacing’: by meddling with their self-conception, stigma can manipulate individuals into a view of themselves that licenses inappropriate demands on them and makes them complicit in the erasure of their identities. (shrink)

Dispositionality and qualitativity are key notions to describe the world that we inhabit. Dispositionality is a matter of what a thing is disposed to do in certain circumstances. Qualitativity is a matter of how a thing is like. According to the Identity Theory of powers, every fundamental property is at once dispositional and qualitative, or a powerful quality. Canonically, the Identity Theory holds a contentious identity claim between a property’s dispositionality and its qualitativity. In the literature, this (...) view faces a contradiction objection that undermines its merits. We should therefore consider an alternative version that does not embrace the identity claim. My aim is to show that we can enjoy the benefits of the Identity Theory without embracing the identity between the dispositional and the qualitative. I shall argue that a distinction between two senses of dispositionality and qualitativity serves the purpose. I will then discuss three readings of the identity claim that can be formulated in light of such a distinction. I will conclude that even if the identity were to fail in any of the suggested readings, it would be possible to hold an account of fundamental powerful qualities. (shrink)

The phenomenon of intentional identity has bemused philosophical communities since Geach (1967). I argue that the phenomenon is ubiquitous and much more significant than previously acknowledged. The foundations of the problem are implicated in many other well-knownpuzzles, such as Kripke’s (1979) puzzles about beliefs. Thus, the need for a proper analysis is eminently pressing. I specify a template for generalizing intentional identity, identify the challenges involved, and argue that positing a level of representational entity in both philosophy of (...) mind and language(e.g., mental files) is a promising approach to tackling the problem across the board. (shrink)

Theories of consciousness that locate experience in specific neural structures face a recurring empirical problem: organisms routinely maintain coherent identity and goal-directed behavior under conditions that should, on localization assumptions, abolish consciousness or split it cleanly. This paper examines two such cases—unihemispheric slow-wave sleep (USWS) in cetaceans and birds, and split-brain phenomena in commissurotomy patients—and argues that both become predictable rather than anomalous when identity is understood as maintained through constraint satisfaction rather than structural integrity. We show that (...) USWS behaviors cannot be dismissed as reflexive automation; that dream unity in split-brain patients is better understood as retrospective reconstruction by the reporting hemisphere than as real-time global integration; and that memory consolidation proceeds through alternative pathways when canonical routes are unavailable. The framework predicts graded degradation, role reassignment under constraint, and sharp threshold failures—abrupt functional collapse when coherence costs exceed available resources, rather than proportional decline. These predictions distinguish the account from seat-based theories and expose it to empirical falsification. Beyond theoretical clarification, the framework has implications for comparative cognition, clinical assessment of disorders of consciousness, and the evaluation of identity persistence in artificial systems. (shrink)

This paper argues that many so-called digital technologies can be construed as notational technologies, explored through the example of Monegraph, an art and digital asset management platform built on top of the blockchain system originally developed for the cryptocurrency bitcoin. As the paper characterizes it, a notational technology is the performance of syntactic notation within a field of reference, a technologized version of what Nelson Goodman called a “notational system.” Notational technologies produce abstracted entities through positive and reliable, or constitutive, (...) tests of socially acceptable meaning. Accordingly, this account deviates from typical narratives of blockchains, instead demonstrating that blockchain technologies are effective at managing digital assets because they produce abstracted identities through the performance of notation. Since notational technologies rely on configurations of socially acceptable meaning, this paper also provides a philosophical account of how blockchain technologies are socially embedded. (shrink)

Education fundamentally focuses on 'individuals', whose human value is rooted in the expression of 'self-identity'. This process is influenced by their social rank and linguistic culture, and within varied discourses and ideological communities, different 'self-identity values' emerge. This applies to all individuals, whether they are citizens or women, and encompasses complex social metaphysical questions. For instance, how do we define social identities such as poverty, disability, privilege, or femininity? 'Intuition' and 'common sense' often fail in such definitions, especially (...) in recognizing exceptions like gender identification, which challenges the distinctions between biological sex and gender identity. The paper analyzes 'Social Historical Structuralism' and ' Performative Theory' to see if they address the challenges of 'Essentialism'. It assesses both pluralism and monism and the autonomy of the 'true self' in educational philosophy's core concepts, grounded in the philosophy of self-identity. This study starts from female community perspectives, addressing women's disadvantaged status in social and linguistic structures and the impact of individualism on gender mainstreaming. This paper concludes by re-evaluating monistic approaches and considering the equitable recognition of community members' autonomy, underscoring the importance of self-identity in educational philosophy amidst the growing influence of identity politics in Western education. -/- Keywords: Self-Identity and Educational Philosophy, Social Metaphysics, Class and Identity, Ideology and Autonomy . (shrink)

Philosophical and psychological accounts of identity have largely proceeded in a representational domain: selves are described in terms of narratives, traits, beliefs, and introspective reports. Yet the biological systems that sustain minded organisms are organized in a different domain entirely — that of phase-coherent rhythms, drift, and cross-scale timing constraints. This paper argues that the persistent puzzles of selfhood arise from conflating these domains and offers a substrate-level redefinition of identity. -/- I develop the thesis that identity (...) is a coherence interface: a regulatory mechanism that stabilizes behavior in a biological phase system whose perceptual apparatus cannot access its own invariants. After characterizing the organism as a coherence-bound ensemble of oscillatory processes, I analyze the “representation gap” between invisible substrate variables (phase, drift, invariants) and the narrative outputs of conscious perception. Ego, belief, delusion, and meaning are then recast as adaptive illusion architectures that maintain functional stability under substrate blindness. On this basis, I formulate an identity law: identity is the regulatory coherence interface of a biological phase system with invariant-blind perception, and I derive testable predictions about drift signatures, delusional breakdown, personality modulation by biological coherence, and the rarity of structural cognition. -/- The account dissolves long-standing disputes between essentialist and narrative theories of self and reframes consciousness as a coherence-reporting process rather than a metaphysical subject. Identity is relocated from metaphysics to biology: from what we say we are, to how a phase-bound system must regulate itself when it cannot see its own invariants. (shrink)

This work proposes Non-Identity-Based Metacognitive Coherence (NIMCC) as a foundational cognitive architecture that operates prior to narrative construction, identity attachment, and self-referential distortion. Rather than treating cognition as an identity-driven, story-maintaining mechanism, NIMCC frames cognition as an auto-regulating awareness-substrate that maintains coherence through direct recognition rather than interpretive processing. The architecture described here is not presented as a metaphor, theory-of-mind, or psychological model built on traditional representational assumptions. It emerges from first-person structural observation: when narrative noise, (...) class='Hi'>identity-maintenance loops, and accumulated distortions collapse, cognition reveals itself as a coherent, self-correcting system that functions without the need for “selfhood” as an organizing principle. NIMCC outlines how awareness detects distortions, resolves them without volitional effort, and restores functional alignment immediately. The work further explores the phenomenology of a non-narrative cognitive baseline, the dissolution of self-referential structures, and the implications for metacognition, autonomy, and human cognitive potential. This paper does not attempt to “explain” consciousness through inherited philosophical categories; instead, it maps what cognition does when the categories fall away. The proposed architecture aims to contribute to discussions in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and phenomenology by offering a structurally coherent account of cognition without identity, narrative, or representational intermediaries. (shrink)

This paper explores the implications of extended and distributed cognition theory for our notions of personal identity. On an extended and distributed approach to cognition, external information is under certain conditions constitutive of memory. On a narrative approach to personal identity, autobiographical memory is constitutive of our diachronic self. In this paper, I bring these two approaches together and argue that external information can be constitutive of one’s autobiographical memory and thus also of one’s diachronic self. To develop (...) this claim, I draw on recent empirical work in human-computer interaction, looking at lifelogging technologies in both healthcare and everyday contexts. I argue that personal identity can neither be reduced to psychological structures instantiated by the brain nor by biological structures instantiated by the organism, but should be seen as an environmentally-distributed and relational construct. In other words, the complex web of cognitive relations we develop and maintain with other people and technological artifacts partly determines our self. This view has conceptual, methodological, and normative implications: we should broaden our concepts of the self as to include social and artifactual structures, focus on external memory systems in the (empirical) study of personal identity, and not interfere with people’s distributed minds and selves. (shrink)