Strange Languages of the Self (1)

Abstract This chapter examines Derek Parfit’s explorations of “strange languages of the self” and their implications for personal identity and rational agency. It begins by presenting Parfit’s Reductionism, which denies the existence of a substantive self while affirming that persons exist as thinkers and agents and contrasts this position with Hume’s claim that ordinary identity judgments are fictional. The chapter introduces the “No-Self language,” which removes reference to persons and instead describes continuities of mental and physical states, concluding that although this language may be equivalent to ordinary discourse, it cannot sustain rational agency because it fails to express first-person, de se beliefs. It proceeds to Parfit’s quasi-concepts, such as quasi-memory and quasi-intention, which aim to explain psychological continuity in fission cases but prove inadequate because they do not preserve the causal and reflexive structures required for agency. Finally, the chapter considers Parfit’s PF language and the more radical Contacti language, showing that neither can ground de se beliefs and therefore both fail to sustain rational agency, which underscores the indispensability of the ordinary concept of the self.