"It" and Grice's "Personal Identity"

by JLS
for the GC

In considering 'free' Grice speaks, as was his wont, of animals (and stones -- a stone falls free). Yet, we wouldn't say that an amoeba is a 'she', or that a stone is a 'he'.

But we do say things like

"acts freely"

or

"does things which we call 'free'"

or

"falls" or "flies" (a free-falling stone, a free-flying albatross)

etc.

Now, if you ask, those forms are referred to, grammatically, as 'third-person'. But that is so biased it should scare you.

The point is an important one when considering the first-person perspective on freedom, where it's introspective and possibly non-evidential, and Grice's attempt to retroactively project 'free' to other stages of 'life' and the 'cosmos'.

Or something like that.

The classicists in us should also focus on the usual "English" translations of Freud, too, that R. O. Doyle, in I-Phi ("Micro and Macro Mind") relates to freewill. 'Id' and 'ego', say.

It seems that 'person' as in 'first person, second person, third person' was not as brilliant a coinage as 'casus' (ptosis), talking of grammatical categories.

For, as I say, it seems not everybody wants to say that a 'stone' is a 'he', and yet 'id', or 'it', is referred to as a "third" person.

Yet, we need, still, a reference to this "third" dimension (Indo-European, in the verbal declension system) which is not yet 'personal'.

I'm less sure how the 'super-ego' relates to the 'ego' but that's FREUD's problem. I think the super-ego is more like a "we", i.e. first-person PLURAL. Or something.

As in "let's" and "don't let's" (sic).

This usually translates to subjunctive first-person plural in Latin and the Romance languages, "Let's go to the cinema". _GO (subj. plural) to the cinema. It makes slightly more sense that the utterer ordering the addressee to 'let' it be the case, or let 'us' be the case that they go to the cinema. Slightly redundantic (sic) if you ask me.

But that fit in that we (some of us -- not necessarily "I") wouldn't say that me and my dog ("we") were in the bathroom. Or that 'we' (a stone and me) were in the park.

When Grice speaks of 'personal identity' back in 1941, there's the further problem with 'self', for we do say that 'She was beautiful. Not so much her dress. While she was beautiful, her dress itself was not so beautiful'. Here we ascribe a self to the dress, which is an 'it' rather. Surely we don't need a mnemic criterion of 'personal' identity for the self of the dress, say.