Grice on Hume on Locke on personal identity -- Grice archive, Carton 7 -- Grice's vagaries on the self

--- This relates to Haugeland.
---- It is listed by Grandy/Warner as it being a joint paper with Haugeland.

---

What about Hume in wiki on this?

It's a vagary on the self.

Wiki reads:

"According to the standard interpretation

of Hume on personal identity, he was a

Bundle Theorist, who held that the self is

nothing but a bundle of interconnected perceptions

linked by relations of similarity and causality; or,

more accurately, that our idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle."

"This view is forwarded by, for example, positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as suggesting that terms such as "self", "person", or "mind" referred to collections of "sense-contents" (See, e.g., A. J. Ayer's account of Hume on the self, in Language, Truth and Logic, op.cit., p.135–6)."

"A modern-day version of the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons (1986)."

"However, some philosophers have criticised the bundle-theory interpretation of Hume on personal identity. It is argued that distinct selves can have perceptions which stand in relations of similarity and causality with one another. Thus perceptions must already come parcelled into distinct "bundles" before they can be associated according to the relations of similarity and causality: in other words, the mind must already possess a unity that cannot be generated, or constituted, by these relations alone. Since the bundle-theory interpretation attributes Hume with answering an ontological or conceptual question, philosophers who see Hume as not very concerned with such questions have queried whether the view is really Hume's, or "only a decoy". (See E. J. Craig, op.cit, Ch.2., for this criticism).

"Instead, it is suggested, Hume might have been answering an epistemological question, about the causal origin of our concept of the self."