H. P. GRICE E J. L. SPERANZA: LA CONVERSAZIONE -- I VERBALI: ROSSELLI

 G.: I am supposed to be digging at personal identity, which is a phrase so agricultural that one expects potatoes rather than persons. S.: Mind will print potatoes if Moore can find a distinction in them. G.: Quite. And yet here I am, with Locke on the desk, Rosselli in the catalogue, and the Navy hanging over my wardrobe like an unpaid metaphysician. S.: Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square. G.: Precisely. One likes to imagine oneself marching off under music rather than under editors. S.: Moore as drum-major would be worth seeing. G.: Only once. The real question is whether I can finish the draft for Mind before I have to exchange tweed for blue. S.: And the topic remains personal identity by memory. G.: Yes, with Locke in the foreground, Reid peering from the north like a conscientious interruption, and all the while the suspicion that the English never took Reid very seriously because he was a Scot and therefore sounded as if he meant to improve them. S.: Which is unforgivable. G.: Deeply. The English will forgive metaphysics sooner than improvement. S.: Still, Reid’s brave officer seems to trouble generations of undergraduates. G.: Only because generations of undergraduates enjoy anything that sounds like a counterexample. S.: You mean the old sequence: the boy flogged at school, the brave officer who remembers the flogging, and the old general who remembers taking the standard but not the flogging. G.: Exactly. Reid says Locke is committed to the officer being the same person as the boy, and the general the same as the officer, but not the same as the boy, which offends transitivity and therefore common decency. S.: And you think Locke saw something already. G.: I think Locke was less helpless than the textbook ritual suggests. He does not say that a present episodic recollection is the sole and exhaustive criterion without remainder. He is after consciousness as appropriated action, not mere parlour memory. S.: Yet the standard presentation says memory theory, and then Reid comes in like a Scottish janitor with a broom. G.: Yes, because the history of philosophy likes tidy floors. But Locke’s talk of consciousness, of being the same self as far as this consciousness extends, leaves room for a more subtle account of connectedness than mere occurrent recollection. S.: So you mean to help him with brain traces. G.: Help is perhaps too generous. I mean to save the theory from a cheap refutation by saying that what matters may be represented physically as a chain of trace-connections capable of underwriting memory, even if not all links are presently lit. S.: That sounds dangerously scientific for Mind. G.: Moore will endure a trace if I present it with enough English diffidence. S.: What exactly is a brain trace in your use? G.: Not a vulgar scratch on cerebral slate, but a persisting physical basis for the potential revival of experience, a condition for memory’s reoccurrence. S.: So the old general need not now remember the flogging if there is a suitable chain of traces from the boy to the officer to the general. G.: Exactly. The officer’s memory of the flogging and the general’s memory of the standard belong to one continuous psychophysical history, even if direct recollection has faded. S.: Then the identity relation is not “remembers directly” but something like “belongs to one overlapping continuity of memory-capacities grounded in traces.” G.: Much better than most of the literature, yes. S.: You say that too easily. G.: I have had a long morning. S.: Then Reid’s alleged counterexample dissolves if one stops fetishising present recollection. G.: Precisely. The mistake is to read Locke as though he were offering a punctual criterion with no temporal depth. But consciousness can extend mediately through connected mnemonic structure. S.: So the officer and the general are linked not because the general now remembers the flogging, but because the general stands in the right continuity relation to a stage that did. G.: Exactly. Which is why I suspect the editor of Mind will not be over-impressed by Reid’s parade-ground dramatics. S.: Moore does not care much for Scottish parade-ground dramatics. G.: Nor for melodrama of any kind unless it conceals an ambiguity. S.: There are several ambiguities here. G.: Deliciously so. “Memory” itself is a nuisance. Does it mean occurrent recollection, stored disposition, recognitional power, trace-preservation, or a public report that one remembers? S.: Undergraduates usually mean the first and write confidently. G.: Undergraduates usually mean whatever lets them end the essay by tea. S.: Then your strategy is to shift from memory as act to memory as capacity. G.: Better: from memory as isolated act to memory as structured system of capacities and traces. S.: Which sounds almost Rossellian. G.: Ah yes, Rosselli and his Thesaurus artificiosae memoriae, arriving indecently early in the story and then being forgotten by posterity while Locke gets remembered as if he invented recollection itself. S.: A good moral there. G.: A very good one. Posterity remembers theories of memory and forgets books on memory. S.: You are tempted to detour through him. G.: Very much so, but Moore would not welcome a Florentine mnemonic Dominican smuggled into an article on Locke. S.: He might, if the Latin were brief. G.: Nothing Florentine is brief when there are chambers of memory involved. S.: Still, the architecture helps your traces. G.: Indeed. The old mnemotechnic notion that memory requires ordered places and deposited images is not so far, mutatis mutandis, from my thought that recollection needs durable organisation in the person’s physical and psychological economy. S.: So instead of rooms and images, you give traces and associations. G.: Precisely. The soul is translated into a less decorative warehouse. S.: And the brave officer into neurology. G.: Into very mild neurology. I do not want Mind thinking I have enlisted under Pavlov before I enlist under the Navy. S.: Yet the trace language lets you say that the general may still be the same person as the boy because what matters is not present report but historical continuity of retained structure. G.: Exactly. If stage A leaves traces that sustain memory at stage B, and stage B leaves traces that sustain memory at stage C, then A, B, and C are connected even where C no longer directly revives A. S.: So the transitivity problem disappears because the identity-maker is not the relation of present remembering, which is not transitive, but the broader continuity relation. G.: That is the whole salvage operation. S.: Why not just say Locke meant that? G.: Because scholars dislike being told that their favourite refutation is over-furnished. S.: And because Locke did not have your trace-language. G.: Precisely. One must be fair. He had consciousness, appropriation, and personal concern; I supply a model for continuity that stops Reid from winning by grammar. S.: Does this make the theory too bodily for Locke? G.: Perhaps for some tastes. But Locke was never shy of saying that God could annex consciousness to different substances, which already means that the story cannot be made to hang on substance alone. If bodily traces are the normal vehicle, that is not a betrayal, only a naturalisation. S.: A dangerous word in Oxford. G.: Very. But less dangerous in print if one keeps the tone apologetically domestic. S.: You mean one says “brain traces” once, then retreats into “continuity.” G.: Exactly. Never frighten an editor more than the page can carry. S.: And Reid? G.: Reid remains useful as irritant. Scots are very good at being usefully irritating. S.: Yet you said the English never took him fully seriously. G.: They took him seriously enough to quote him and not seriously enough to let him spoil Locke permanently. There is a peculiarly English way of honouring a Scot by turning him into a tutorial nuisance rather than a victor. S.: So Moore will likely regard Reid as brisk but not fatal. G.: I hope so. Moore likes precision, not theatrical collapse. S.: Then how does personal identity finally read in your draft? G.: As the persistence of a person through a continuity of psychological life centrally involving memory, but not exhausted by any one moment of actual recollection. S.: You avoid strict criterion-language. G.: I try to. Criteria breed trouble in philosophy like damp breeds mildew. S.: And the Navy? G.: The Navy breeds uniforms, which is the immediate concern. S.: Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square. G.: You are enjoying that too much. S.: Only enough. But surely the uniform adds something to personal identity. G.: It does. It gives one a public sign under which strangers may misidentify the private continuant. S.: A uniform is a visible criterion with no metaphysical force. G.: Splendid. Keep that for some future occasion. S.: Happily. But does your trace-continuity account allow for false memories? G.: Of course. That is another reason to prefer continuity over isolated occurrent recollection. A present memory-claim may be false even where the person remains the same. Identity cannot hang on every report of inward revival. S.: So memory evidence is defeasible. G.: Entirely. One may misremember and remain oneself. S.: Then Locke’s deeper point is about ownership of experience, not infallibility of retrieval. G.: Very good. The self is where consciousness can rightly appropriate past action as its own. Trace-continuity explains how such appropriation may be historically sustained even when its explicit manifestations are partial. S.: And Reid’s boy, officer, and general become a misunderstanding born of treating “remembers” as if it were both sufficient and exclusive. G.: Yes. Reid attacks a caricature with admirable Scottish energy. S.: That too is almost a line. G.: Keep it but shave the adjective. S.: “Reid attacks a caricature with Scottish energy.” G.: Better. S.: And what of the famous objection that your continuity relation threatens circularity, since one must already know which experiences belong to the same person in order to count them as connected memories? G.: Ah, one of the few respectable objections. The answer is that the continuity relation is not defined by presupposing identity at each point, but by causal-psychological linkage among states that stand in the right experiential succession. S.: So one individuates the chain by actual dependence, not by mere report. G.: Precisely. A memory-state at t2 is connected to an experience at t1 if it depends in the right way on a trace left by that experience. S.: Then we are really quite close to what later philosophers will call causal theories of memory. G.: Uncomfortably close, yes, which means I must phrase it as though it were only common sense in a well-combed form. S.: Moore likes common sense well-combed. G.: He likes it almost shaved. S.: Does your draft mention Rosselli at all? G.: No. Rosselli remains my private amusement, not my public argument. S.: A pity. G.: One cannot do everything in one paper. Mind is not a Venetian memory palace. S.: Yet the irony of a mnemonic treatise printed a century before Locke and then forgotten while Locke becomes canonical is almost too good to waste. G.: I know. But some pleasures must remain private if one wants publication before conscription. S.: That sounds almost like a maxim. G.: It is merely administrative wisdom. S.: Then let me ask the more Lockean question. If identity consists in continuity of consciousness, why do you need traces at all? G.: Because otherwise continuity becomes magical. If one says merely that consciousness extends, one owes some account of how it extends across interruptions, sleep, forgetting, and bodily change. S.: So traces are the machinery of extension. G.: Exactly. They are what keep consciousness from becoming a metaphysical elastic band. S.: And sleep? G.: No problem, provided the trace-system remains intact enough to permit resumption of the same psychological life. S.: Then the person persists through intervals of non-consciousness because the conditions for resumed consciousness belong to one continuing organism. G.: Precisely. Locke is often caricatured as making the self blink out between naps. One must rescue him from readers who think consciousness means uninterrupted occurrent notice. S.: And the brave officer again? G.: The brave officer is only a moment in a sequence, not the arbiter of the whole. His direct memory of the flogging shows one overlap. The general’s memory of the standard shows another. The chain suffices. S.: So personal identity is preserved by overlap, not by universal direct recall. G.: Exactly. S.: That seems almost too easy. G.: Only because bad objections are often too easy. S.: You are in a sour mood toward Scotland. G.: Not Scotland, only its use in lecture notes. S.: Then perhaps you should add a sentence saying that Reid’s example presses only against a crude memory criterion, not against a continuity theory faithful to Locke’s deeper intention. G.: That is very nearly what I shall do. S.: And “brain traces”? G.: Perhaps “physiological traces” if I wish to sound less like a laboratory assistant. S.: “Brain traces” is brisker. G.: Briskness is not always one’s friend before Moore. S.: True. He prefers sentences to arrive ironed. G.: Exactly. One must never startle Cambridge more than is required. S.: Yet the phrase has force. G.: It does. And one may perhaps risk it once, if only to show that memory is not an ethereal visiter but a function of preserved conditions. S.: Then your view becomes that what matters is not present introspective availability but persisting structure capable of grounding appropriate remembrance. G.: Yes. That is the whole point in one sentence. S.: Good. I shall remember it. G.: If you do not, I shall trust the trace. S.: Very nice. And the title? G.: Personal Identity. Brutally plain, which editors adore because they think it promises submission. S.: And what do you really submit? G.: A polite correction to Locke’s readers, a gentle dismissal of Reid’s triumph, and an essay sufficiently mindful for Mind. S.: Before the uniform. G.: Before the uniform, yes. S.: Goodbye Piccadilly, farewell Leicester Square. G.: If you repeat it once more, I shall enlist you. S.: I should be useless at sea. G.: Most philosophers are; that never stopped them becoming admirals of distinctions. S.: Then what of the line in Locke scholars that Reid is no counterexample because Locke himself already has the materials to answer him? G.: That line is right, in part. Locke’s resources are richer than the caricature. What I add is not contradiction but articulation. Reid’s case fails because Locke never needed to tie identity to uninterrupted direct recollection in the crude way supposed. S.: So you are really doing exegesis with reinforcements. G.: Precisely. One cannot send Locke to Mind undefended against Scotland armed only with piety. S.: And the editor will like the anti-Scottish conclusion? G.: Moore will like the anti-muddle conclusion. The Scots enter only as weather. S.: You are incorrigible. G.: Which is why the piece may succeed. S.: Does uniformed service alter personal identity? G.: It alters the surface, the expectations, the public pronouns, and perhaps the patience, but not the continuant, unless the traces are very badly handled. S.: Then the Navy may dress the person without constituting him. G.: Exactly. Another useful distinction. S.: You are full of them today. G.: One must stockpile before war. S.: Dry enough? G.: Sufficiently naval, with one eye on Locke and the other on the post. S.: And the punchline? G.: If Reid thinks he has sunk Locke with a brave officer and an old general, he has merely shown that direct memory is a poor admiral; continuity, with a few discreet traces below deck, still commands the ship.