Sameness and the self: philosophical and psychological considerations

In this paper I examine the concept of cross-temporal personal identity (diachronicity). This particular form of identity has vexed theorists for centuries—e.g., how can a person maintain a belief in the sameness of self over time in the face of continual psychological and physical change? I first discuss various forms of the sameness relation and the criteria that justify their application. I then examine philosophical and psychological treatments of personal diachronicity (for example, Locke's psychological connectedness theory; the role of episodic memory) and find each lacking on logical grounds, empirical grounds or both. I conclude that to achieve a successful resolution of the issue of the self as a temporal continuant we need to draw a sharp distinction between the feeling of the sameness of one's self and the evidence marshaled in support of that feeling.

• Publication year

  2014

• Venue

  Frontiers in Psychology

• Publication date

  2014-01-29

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Philosophy, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00029PMID 24523707PMCID 3905202
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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