Conventionalism about Persons and Reflexive Reference: A Contextualized Approach

Many Perdurantists have been drawn to the “Conventionalist” idea that our person-directed attitudes can determine whether or not we survive events such as teletransportation. In this paper, I suggest a novel “Contextualist Conventionalism” according to which Conventionalism is true with respect to some, but not all, contexts in which we ask “will I survive?”—instead in “reflexive” contexts, “I” reflexively refers to a thinker whose persistence conditions are mind-independent. Unlike one form of Conventionalism which implies that the reference of “I” is never constrained to reflexively referring to the thinker (cf. Zimmerman, D. (2012). Personal identity and the survival of death. In B. Bradley, F. Feldman, & J. Johansson (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of philosophy of death (pp. 97–154). Oxford University Press.), Miller, K. (2013). Personal identity minus the persons. Philosophical Studies, 166, S91–S109.), Kovacs, D. (2020). Diachronic self-making. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 98(2), 349–362.), Kurtsal, I. (2022). Self-Determination in Plenitude. Erkenntnis, 87, 2397–2418.), Longenecker, M. (2023). Conventionalism about Persons and the Nonidentity Problem. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 101(4), 954–967.), Contextualist Conventionalism instead implies that there are some important contexts where the “I” is so constrained. And unlike another form of Conventionalism that secures such reflexive reference by holding that the survival of the thinker is a mind-dependent matter (a view which might be attributed to Braddon-Mitchell, D., & West, C. (2001). Temporal Phase Pluralism Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, LXII(1), 59–83.), or Braddon-Mitchell, D., & Miller, K. (2004). How to be a conventional person. The Monist, 87(4), 457–474., 2020), Contextualist Conventionalism secures reflexive reference while avoiding such a radical metaphysical commitment.