Abstract

1. I know that Sydney Shoemaker thinks that persons and their identities are real things. The word ‘construct’ enters my critique only in my IV, in the wake of my questions—cognate with the ‘fair question’ Shoemaker mentions in his last paragraph—about the weirdly impersonal characterization of mental states into which Shoemaker is forced by his desire to see personal identity as a matter of synchronic and diachronic unity relations holding between mental states. I see the impersonality of these characterizations as the price Shoemaker pays for his refusal to acknowledge that the relation of persons to states is conceptually prior to the unity relation between states. The causality that Shoemaker sees as involved in the ‘immanent causation’ by which substances persist is recognized much better in the same what? approach of S & SR, the what importing reference to a thing-kind with some specific way of behaving.