Essay on P.F.

Strawson’s Individualist
Theory
Does Strawson’s individualist theory overcome the problem
of numerically identifying people that he says Cartesian
dualism presents?
P.F. Strawson, in Self, Mind and Body, presents a criticism of the way Cartesian
dualism treats predicate-subject sentences concerning people(Strawson, 2003).
Specifically, he argues that Cartesian dualism, in equating the self with the
immaterial mind, presents the problem of being unable to numerically identify
people since they have no apparent numerical identity in the Cartesian model.
As a support for his own holistic theory of individualism, Strawson argues that
the only way to overcome this problem is by treating humans as individuals
without constituent parts. This essay will assess how successful his theory is at
surmounting the problem of numerical identity. The structure of the essay will be
as follows: The first section will explain Strawson’s individualist model; the
second will outline his problem with Cartesian dualism and his proposed solution;
the third will explore the possible problems for Strawson’s own model in terms of
numerical identity; and the final section will consider possible defences of
individualism.

In Strawson’s essay Individuals, he argues against Cartesian reductivism in

favour of a holistic view of individuals which incorporates both the mind and the
body as dependent aspects of the self, based on Kant’s analytic
philosophy(Strawson, 1959). Whereas Cartesian dualism treats mind and body as
separate substances which can exist independently, Strawson’s model treats
persons as logical primitives; that is, a person is an irreducible concept that can
only be used as part of a description of complex ideas and cannot be analysed in
terms of simpler, more primitive concepts. A mind – which in the Cartesian model
is the primitive “thinking thing” and identical with the ‘self’ – is not a primitive,
according to Strawson: “It can exist only, if at all, as a secondary, non-primitive
concept, which is itself to be explained, analysed, in terms of the concept of a
person”. In the individualist model, a person is an ‘atomic’ unit and the true
subject of predicate-subject sentences which describe people. To use Strawson’s
example from Self, Mind and Body, the statement “Mary’s consciousness was
entirely occupied by the thought of how becoming her dress was”, although it
seems to refer specifically to Mary’s mind, would not make sense if Mary was not
a whole person who is physically wearing a dress, but only an immaterial
consciousness.

The crux of Strawson’s criticism then follows: a truly Cartesian language which
referred to minds but not bodies would be incapable of achieving a reference to
an independent and unique person. If a person is an immaterial mind
independent of a body, they cannot be numerically identified as an individual,
i.e. we would not be able to identify or ‘count’ a person as separate from other
people the way we normally would, nor would we be able to re-identify them as
the same person over time. This is because the mind has no apparently enduring
features except with reference to a whole person including their body, nor is it
spatially exclusive. Strawson argues that, if the self is only the mind, he would
not be able to know when speaking to one person, firstly, whether they are only
a single mind (a thousand minds could theoretically share the experiences of a
single person since they would be independent of separate, identifiable physical
bodies) and secondly, whether they are the same mind over time. The latter
problem, of re-identification, is derived from Kant; if a mind is independent of the
apparent physical continuity of a body, it could be argued that a consciousness is
actually a series of different minds in a kind causal chain, so what appears to be
the same person over time is actually a series of numerically distinct individuals.

The purported solution to this problem is individualism. By treating individual

persons as primitives, we can numerically identify them because they must each
have only one mind and one body – the mind and body would be derived from
the single person, not the other way around. According to Strawson, the anti-
Cartesian’s “recipe for counting individual minds is to count people; for him the
identification of a mind presents no greater (and no less) a problem than the
identification of a person”. If minds are inseparable parts of persons, along with
bodies, then as long as a person’s body is spatially exclusive and persistent over
time, so will their mind be. Prima facie, the former condition is true, since two
physical objects cannot occupy the same space (one might invoke
electromagnetic repulsion or the uncertainty principle to illustrate this) and the
latter is also acceptable since a body seems to be a causally contiguous object
that endures time and, to a certain extent, change.

However, there is reason to question the idea that bodies can actually be re-
identified over time. A body is a constantly changing system with tissues and
organs gradually recycling the matter they are composed of. This potentially
creates a “ship of Theseus” dilemma – if a person is not composed of the same
physical matter as they were before, are they still indeed the same person?
Furthermore, the problem of change over time may be even more fundamental
than this. A person obviously changes their position, shape, structure and other
properties constantly, leading us to question whether identity over time is a
meaningful concept at all. As Irving Copi points out in his article Essence and
Accident: “If an object which changes really changes, then it cannot literally be
one and the same object which undergoes the change. But if the changing thing
retains its identity, then it cannot really have changed”(Copi, 1954). It seems
that, under more rigorous analysis, the idea of a body or any physical object
having the same actual identity over time is difficult to support.

How would the individualist defend against this criticism? It seems that they
would have to find something residual in a person which does not change over
time. The body changes constantly and consequently may not retain any
constant identity; but if the anti-Cartesian were to argue that it is a person’s
mind that is the residual aspect of a person, they would have to abandon the
criticism that minds alone cannot be re-identified over time. Another defence is
possible, though: what certainly is a residual aspect of a person is the conceptual
identity which other people assign to them, and this seems to be what Strawson
appeals to when trying to overcome the problem of numerical identity, rather
than appealing to the objective persistence of bodies. His essay is rich with
references to “ordinary cases” of identification, how identity is “intelligibly”
discussed, and he characterises the Cartesian’s dilemma in terms of deriving
identity of minds from the concept of personal identity and the consequences
this would have for the mind/body separation. As a Kantian, Strawson is not
capable of appealing to facts about metaphysical reality, so he appeals to our
phenomenal experience of individuals. The consequences this has for his wider
argument are unclear; the Cartesian model is not based on social concepts and
experiences, since it is meant to be a result of purely rational and introspective
inquiry, and hence may not be susceptible to a criticism based on a public,
rather than private, concept of identity. As such, the Kantian foundations of
Strawson’s model would need to be examined in order to confirm whether it can
truly undermine the Cartesian method.

In conclusion, it can be said that Strawson’s individualist theory surmounts the

problem of numerical identity of individuals faced by Cartesian dualism.
However, this is not achieved solely by virtue of its incorporation of bodies into
the model of an individual person, but by appeal to the common conceptual
identification of people by other people. It could be argued that this social
approach to the problem avoids the real issue of numerical identity and has no
relevance to Cartesian dualism since Descartes’ meditative inquiry was entirely a
private process. To establish the viability of individualism as a solution to the
problem of numerical identity would thus require a deeper scrutiny of the
Kantian framework on which it is founded.

Works Cited
Copi, I. M. (1954). Essence and Accident. The Journal of Philosophy , 51 (23), 706-
719.

Strawson, P. F. (1959). Individuals: An Essay in Descriptive Metaphysics. London:

Routledge.

Strawson, P. F. (2003). Self, Mind and Body. In S. Guttenplan, J. Hornsby, & C.

Janaway, Reading Philosophy: Selected Texts with a Method for Beginners (pp.
28-35). Oxford: Blackwell.