Individuals By Pf Strawson Pdf

Introduction to StrawsonProfessor Sir Peter Strawson (born 1919) studied at the University of Oxford, where he became Waynflete Professor of Metaphysics from 1968 until his retirement. In the text below Strawson refers to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations (1953) of which he wrote an instructive review at the time of its first publication.His 1959 book Individuals has been extremely influential. Many of its themes run through his work, and some are to be found in the text below.

The numberof individuals,names,soulsand rolesis limitedin the clan,and the line of the. Van Fraassen has presented in Scientific Representation an attractive notion. Strawson PF (1959) Individuals. Multilingual individuals and multilingual societies Thinking with External Representations. Strawson PF (1959) Individuals.

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Those themes include: the problem of individuation, the distinction between subject and predicate, the nature of persons, and the possibility of objective knowledge.In ‘Self, Mind and Body’, Strawson argues against Descartes’ distinction between mind and body, and in favour of a unitary view of human beings. Strawson, ‘Self, Mind and Body’ (A Summary)One of the marks of a really great philosopher is to make a really great mistake.

Philosophers struggling with one of these fundamental misconceptions think of it under the name of Cartesian dualism. Not that they all think of the doctrine as a misconception.In this article I want to try to bring out the force of one way of demonstrating the central error in Cartesian dualism.

First, we need a reasonably clear statement of the dualist position to work on.We can ascribe to one individual human being things as various as actions, intentions, sensations, thoughts, feelings, perceptions, memories, physical position, corporeal characteristics, skills or abilities, traits of character and so on. A Cartesian dualist is one who holds that that this way of talking about people tends to disguise rather than display the real nature of a human individual. He thinks, that of these various predicates some refer directly to his bodily condition and some refer in a complicated way to both at once.The history of the human beings is thus not the history of one two-sided thing, but the history of two one-sided things – a body and a soul, mind, or individual consciousness. These are distinct kinds of things which distinct kinds of properties.Now if the Cartesian were right in this, it should be possible to lay down the general outlines of a new and more metaphysically revealing way of talking about people, which would reflect the dualism of metaphysical subjects.It might seem at first that the germs of a Cartesian style of speech is already present in our ordinary style of speech about people, for we explicitly ascribe predicates to people’s bodies and also to people’s minds.However, this is clearly not enough for the Cartesian. The anti-Cartesian holds that the concept of a person’s mind has a secondary or dependent status for his, a type of thing who which predicates of all those various classes I distinguished earlier can be ascribed.

Just so we can talk of the surfaces of tables as well as of tables, while recognizing that the concept of a surface in dependent on the concept of a material object. Similarly, the anti-Cartesian holds, the concept of a mind is dependent on the concept of a living person.But the Cartesian must hold that the notion of a mind is completely intelligible apart from the notion of a person whose mind it is.Thus, for a Cartesian reduction to be successfully carried through, statements of which the subjects are people are required to be replaceable in principle with sentences of which the subjects are either minds or bodies. Hence the predicates of our original sentences must be capable of being analysed into consciousness-predicates or body-predicates.

Moreover, the Cartesian reduction sentences must be genuinely reductive.These difficulties are very clearly indicated in recent British philosophy, notably in Professor Ryle’s book, The Concept of Mind, and it Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Yet I think that a convinced Cartesian might be comparatively unmoved by this kind of difficulty. He might maintain that it was obvious that human activities involve both mental and bodily processes; and it would be hard to deny this.What would move the Cartesian much more, I think, would be a clear demonstration that there are no such things as minds, and that the concept of individual minds is only to be understood as logically derivative from the concept of individual persons. It is up to the Cartesian to show that this is not so.It is easy enough for the Cartesian to meet this difficulty, for he may give examples of expressions designating consciousness which don’t formally depend on designating people.

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But we still do not know whether we achieve a reference to a mind which is genuinely independent of reference to a person, until we know the answer to a further question: what justifies us in using the word ‘the’ – implying reference to a single one – before ‘mind’?It is here that we come – at last – to the central difficulty in Cartesianism. If we are to talk coherently about individual consciousness, or any individual item whatsoever, we must know the difference between one such item and two such items.

And this means that we must know how to identify the same item at different times.What do we mean by ‘the same consciousness’ if not ‘the same person’s consciousness’? In a rough paraphrase of Kant: if you are allowed to invoke a hypothesis whenever you like, without being required to elucidate the principle of its application, what is to prevent me from introducing a rival hypothesis also unelucidated: wherever you say there’s one continuing soul, I say there’s a whole series.Either the concept of identity of consciousness is derivative from the concept of identity of people or they are not. If they are, then our ordinary style of talking about humans is not reducible in the way in which the Cartesian must hold. If they are not, if a Cartesian reduction is in principle possible, then it must also be possible to make independently intelligible what is meant by identity of human consciousness.The source of the Cartesian delusion is, I think, in the introspective concentration of which seems to have been characteristic of Descartes’ own meditations. One is tempted to say in such moments one has direct experience of oneself as a conscious being.However, the ordinary personal pronouns including ‘I’ and ‘my’ are ordinarily used for the purposes of personal reference. When we reflect philosophically on the type of introspective experience I have just described, we can quite easily get into a kind of daze about the meaning of ‘I’, and then perhaps we might begin to feel that we don’t have to explain the notions of identity as applied to the soul, for we have direct experience of the individuality of it.

But, really, if we make this kind of claim then we are both trying to keep the indubitabililty of the experience and at the same time to keep the ordinary referential force of ‘I’. It should be easy to see this, since Kant exposed the illusion; yet, as Kant also remarked, the illusion is powerful.

Nevertheless, there is nothing in experience itself to rule out the suggestion that there might be a thousand exactly similar experiences occurring in association with the same body.The fact is that a Cartesian and an anti-Cartesian alike want their doctrine to have just one consciousness which lasts throughout, and there is only one way of guaranteeing this consequence; and that is to allow that the notions of singularity and identity of consciousnesses are conceptually dependent on those of singularity of people. If we allow this, we must reject a Cartesian conception of the soul. Commentary on StrawsonIn reading Descartes and Strawson together, you might bear in mind that Descartes’ arguments for the ‘Cartesian position’ are not completed at the end of his Second Meditation. In the Sixth Meditation he presents his argument for mind-body distinctness, and he prepares some of the ground for this in the Second.Strawson begins by suggesting that the Cartesian dualist is committed to thinking that there is a philosophically more revealing way of talking about people than our everyday way. That is, if a human being was really ‘two one-sided things’ then what would really be said, when a predicate is ascribed to a human being, might be best expressed with two subject-predicate sentences – one having a soul as subject and the other having a body.Strawson thinks the Cartesian dualist ought to be able to show that they can analyse statements about persons into statements about souls and statements about bodies.

That we cannot understand a sentence about a person’s mind except by understanding a sentence about them as a person.We might call Strawson’s central argument the ‘identity and numerability argument’. With it, Strawson wants to know how we are to understand terms which, according to the Cartesian stand for minds.He wants to show that that the Cartesian’s formal way of meeting this difficulty cannot succeed in showing that we can make reference to individual minds. His underlying claim is that no one really understands the concept of a thing unless they can say what it is for something to be that individual thing. If we can talk about such a thing, then there must be something to be said about what makes that thing different from all other exactly similar things. The problem of ‘numberability’ is that the Cartesian doesn’t have any principled way of saying what it is for there to be one soul as opposed to many. And the problem of ‘re-identification’ is that the Cartesian doesn’t have any principled way of saying what it is for the same soul to be identified first at one time, then at another. ConclusionStrawson thinks that the Cartesian suffers a ‘delusion’, for which a style of thinking is partly reasonable.

When we think introspectively we are apt to suppose that we just know what ‘I’ means. But then we deceive ourselves because we use the word ‘I’ in thought supposing that the very experience of introspection tells us what it means while actually relying upon its meaning what it ordinarily does.