Methodological Aspects of Grice´s "Personal Identity" (Mind, 1941)

---

THIS IS THE FIRST essay published by Grice, if not written by him. "Negation I", as catalogued in the Grice Papers is. Indeed, we have some outlook at the methodological aspects of that "Negation I" paper which are MORE characteristic (since he was written in the less stressful situation than writing for a journal) of Grice than that of the more artificial scenario he finds himself in with "Personal Identity".

"Personal Identity" is a concern for an "analysis", qua "logical construction", of "I" in:

i. I fell from the stairs yesterday.

-----

Surely deflationary! Philosophers had been saying such grand and grandiose things about it: the pure-ego, the desguise description. Grice finds the logical construction more to his taste.

He proposes a reduction of "I" statements in terms of JUST memory. In this scenario, amnesia DOES involve a breakdown of identity.

Years, later, in PPQ, vol. 67, Grice will get so irritated by the typically simplistic approaches by Davidson to these issues, that he gives us a lesson in "personality theory". The "I", for Grice, is basic.

"I will do it"
"I believe"

--- His example then,

"Now keep your head, Meiggs".

This was something Grice overheard his tutor Hardie deliver. The idea, later considered by Kenny, etc., is that the soul is something like tripartite. We do have the ego, but we have the superego and the id. Or we have the charioteer and the two horses in Plato´s picture, or we have akrasia and incontentia in Aristotle.

YET. Grice does NOT want to say that "I contain multitudes" (as Whitman did). For Grice, there is one "I".

The problem with the Scots philosophers -- Reid, et al. -- had to do with those alleged conterexamples to the effect that a man who recovers his memory is still the SAME man, and not a ´new´ person.

But surely that´s a borderline side to the issue.

Grice is an intentionalist. Behavioural or merely physical criteria (like body continuancy) cannot DELIVER "I". For "I" needs a "mind"; it needs a consciousness; it needs a Grice!