Locke’s Psychological Account for Personal Identity (Research Paper Example)

📌Category: Philosophers, Philosophical Theories, Philosophy
📌Words: 726
📌Pages: 3
📌Published: 09 June 2022

John Locke, an influential philosopher of the 17th century, wrote an essay titled Of Identity and Diversity. In this essay, Locke touches on a theory about personal identity in which he claims, in theory, a person when fifteen years old would be the same person as when they were five years old due to psychological continuity. In this essay, I will be explaining, in depth, Locke’s psychological account of personal identity, presenting a possible objection to his account, and suggesting a response to that objection. Although Locke’s theory is a great attempt at an answer to the question of personal identity, there are weak points in it that have been exploited by other philosophers.

To start, Locke’s psychological account of personal identity begins with Locke talking about how different animals and plants, from young to old and small to large, are the same animal or plant regardless of the physical changes it has gone through. He continues to make a specific distinction between a person and a human. Locke claims that a human is a biological title that refers to the species. He claims that a person is “A thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness, which is inseparable from thinking, and as it seems to me essential to it,” (Locke - OF IDENTITY AND DIVERSITY from An Essay Concerning Human Understanding.pdf, 9) meaning that due to the ability of reasoning and thinking, you are separate from the biological title “human.” Therefore, according to Locke, there is a difference between saying two men are the same human and two men are the same person. Finally, he goes on to explain that consciousness accompanies thinking, therefore the identity of a person only goes as far back in time as the furthest memory or thought. This means that a person is the same person as the furthest memory he/she has of being that person. 

A possible criticism of this account comes from Reid’s objection in which philosopher Thomas Reid brings up an example of an officer who had remembered being flogged as a child. Later in life, that same officer a few years down the road, now a general, could remember his days as an officer but had no recollection of him as a young boy being flogged. Reid argues that the general is the same person as the officer and the officer is the same person as the boy, therefore, the general is the same person as the boy. However, according to the same theory, due to the general not having memory or recollection of the boy, they are not the same person. This creates a contradiction because now the general is and is not the same person as the schoolboy. 

A possible response to this objection is to say that although the argument is valid in which they are the same person due to the officer remembering the boy and the general remembering the officer, the argument could be made that due to the general not remembering the boy, there was a great shift in personality somewhere between the officer remembering the boy and the officer becoming the general. This would lead to the general or late officer to not be the same person as the boy. Although they are the same human, as mentioned earlier in the essay in Of Identity and Diversity, they would not be the same person due to the lack of memory from boy to general. Another response to this objection is to make clearer definitions in the initial theory such as a clear definition of a memory chain, meaning that if earlier in life one had a memory that they no longer remembered, they could remember a time wherein they did have that memory which would mean that they are, in fact, the same person. 

In conclusion, John Locke wrote a very strong theory regarding personal identity that explained why a human in a later stage of life would be the same person as the same human earlier in their life. However, there was a weak part of his theory that Thomas Reid exploited to uncover the possibility of contradiction. This contradiction is found due to a lack of explanation of memory chains that allows a flaw in the theory that a man could remember being a boy but the same old man could not remember being a boy, therefore the old man is not the same person as the boy. A definition of memory chains to the theory that shows they would be the same person could be added to Locke’s theory to make it stronger.

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