QuestionsWho am I, really?Butler's circle: consciousness presupposes identity
Who am I, really?A soul

Butler's circle: consciousness presupposes identity

The circularity objection to Locke

Joseph Butler 1692 · 1752English bishop and moralist: happiness comes from satisfying particular affections, not from the self-love that aims at it.
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What it claims

Consciousness of personal identity cannot constitute it: it only reveals it. Being the same person does not depend on what one remembers.

Why

Remembering an act already presupposes being the person who did it: so consciousness cannot be what constitutes identity.

The same idea through history
John Locke1694Locke holds that a person's identity reaches as far as their consciousness of the past. This is the thesis Butler attacks, without naming Locke in the key sentence.
In short

"Butler's circle: consciousness presupposes identity" is an argument by Joseph Butler (Of Personal Identity, 1736) on the question "Who am I, really?" (answer: a soul). Its claim: Consciousness of personal identity cannot constitute it: it only reveals it. Being the same person does not depend on what one remembers. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the conclusion does follow from its 5 premises. AskPhilosophy presents 3 objections, 2 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Of Personal Identity, 1736
Valid

For Locke, what makes a person the same is the consciousness they have of their past actions. Butler, an English bishop, sees a circle. For my memory to be a true memory, it must really be me who did the action I remember. My consciousness of the past therefore already presupposes that I am the same person: it cannot produce it. It is like saying that knowledge makes the truth of what it knows. For Butler, self-consciousness only lets us discover an identity that already exists.

P1By reflecting upon what is myself now and what was myself twenty years ago, I discern that they are not two selves but one and the same self. Consciousness of myself makes me know my identity.
P2When I remember a past action, I am as certain of the person who did it, myself, as I am that the action took place at all. The memory therefore already contains the idea that it was me.
P3What presupposes a thing cannot constitute it: knowledge, in every other case, cannot constitute the truth it presupposes.
P4To say that consciousness of the past makes personal identity is to say that a person has not existed a single moment, nor done one action, except what they can remember.
P5But remembering or forgetting makes no change to the truth of a past fact: I existed and acted at moments I no longer remember.
Therefore consciousness of personal identity cannot constitute it: it only reveals it. Being the same person does not depend on what one remembers.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
The argument has two independent routes to the same conclusion. First route: memory presupposes identity (P2), and what presupposes a thing cannot constitute it (P3). Second route: if consciousness constituted identity, one would have existed only at the moments one remembers (P4), which is false (P5). P1 gives the positive part: consciousness reveals identity. Removing one route is therefore not enough to reject the conclusion.
Analogy. A thermometer shows the temperature, it does not make it. To say it makes the heat of the room would forget that there must already be a temperature for it to show. Memory is the thermometer of identity.

Objections

3

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

John Locke (false memories) 1694 · attacks premise 2

We cannot rule out that a thinking substance may have represented to it, as done by itself, an action it never did, as in a dream we take for true. A memory, even one lived from the inside, therefore does not guarantee that it was me who did the action.

Butler replies
Butler Butler's reply
Butler acknowledges the question: may we not possibly be deceived? But it can be asked at the end of any demonstration, because it concerns the truth of memory. Whoever doubts memory here may also doubt reasoning and intuition. It is ridiculous to try to prove the truth of our faculties other than by those very faculties.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Butler does not show that false memories are impossible: he holds that doubting memory in general leaves nothing to prove. Locke relies on the goodness of God. The core disagreement: must memory be guaranteed before conclusions are drawn from it, or taken as a starting point? An open point, with no widely accepted answer.
David Hume 1739 · attacks premise 1

When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never catch myself without a perception, and never observe anything but the perception. So there is no consciousness of the self that could let us discern one same self at two moments.

a defender replies
see the argument
No reply possible: objection raised in 1739, after the author's death (1752).
Thomas Reid defender of the argument · 1785
Reid, who fully agrees with Butler, answers that my thoughts, actions and feelings change every moment and have only a successive existence. I am not one of them: I am that to which they belong, and this self is permanent.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Hume finds in himself only perceptions, never a self that bears them; Reid on the contrary asserts that we are what thinks, acts and suffers, and that this self is permanent. The core disagreement: is there an experience of the self, or is a bundle of perceptions enough? An open point, with no widely accepted answer.
Sydney Shoemaker (quasi-memory) 1970 · attacks premise 3

Ordinary memory does presuppose identity: remembering doing something is thinking that I did it. But one can define a quasi-memory, a memory that comes from a person's experience, without assuming that this person is me. A chain of quasi-memories can then explain identity without circularity: Butler's charge applies only to ordinary memory.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1970, after the author's death (1752).
Where the debate stands (our summary)Shoemaker grants Butler that ordinary memory is circular, and changes the notion to avoid it. It is still discussed whether quasi-memory really escapes the circle, and whether it suffices to account for what makes identity. An open point, with no widely accepted answer.