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Analysis Advance Access published online on September 28, 2009
Analysis, doi:10.1093/analys/anp137
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of The Analysis Trust. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org

The thinking animal problem and personal pronoun revisionism

Harold W. Noonan

University of Nottingham Nottingham NG72RD, UK harold.noonan@nottingham.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

In his book, Eric Olson (2007) makes some criticisms of a response to the problem of the thinking animal (also called the ‘too many minds’ or ‘too many thinkers’ problem) which I have offered, on behalf of the neo-Lockean psychological continuity theorist. Olson calls my proposal ‘personal pronoun revisionism’ (though I am not suggesting any revision). In what follows I shall say what my proposal actually is, defend it and briefly respond to Olson's criticism.

The problem of the thinking animal, briefly, is that it seems indisputable that human animals, i.e. human beings, or at least, all normal healthy adult human beings, are thinkers. But so, by definition, are persons. However, according to the psychological continuity theorist of personal identity, persons are not human beings (they differ in their persistence conditions). So the psychological continuity theory entails the existence of too many thinkers. Moreover, it creates an irresoluble . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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