Experiment #108 · Thought experiment

Reid's Brave Officer

Memory chains and personal identity

Thomas Reid (against Locke) · 1785 · Personal identity

First published: T. Reid, *Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man* (1785), Essay III, ch. 6.

A general remembers being a brave officer; the officer remembers being a flogged schoolboy; the general remembers nothing of the schoolboy. Locke's memory criterion fails.

Reid objected to Locke's memory criterion of personal identity with a clean counterexample. Suppose a general remembers being a brave officer at a battle; the brave officer remembered being flogged as a schoolboy; the general remembers nothing of the schoolboy. By Locke's criterion (psychological continuity via memory), the general is identical with the officer, and the officer with the schoolboy — but not the general with the schoolboy. Identity is transitive; psychological continuity (as Locke defined it) is not. The case forced a refinement of Locke's theory (ancestral chains of memory) and remains a standard reference in personal-identity theory.

Formulation

General G remembers being officer O; officer O remembers being schoolboy S. General G does not remember being S. If memory-continuity entails identity: G = O and O = S but not G = S — violating transitivity of identity.

Compare this experiment

Dimensions Engaged

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Observer

Observer · Knowledge Retainment: are memory chains the right structure for tracking personal identity over time?

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Time

Time · Direction: persistence requires identity to extend across time spans where memory does not directly bridge.

Responses — How Schools Engage

Affirms / takes the bait 2

Realism

Common-sense realism: the general just *is* the same person as the schoolboy, regardless of memory. The persistence is bodily and biographical, not purely psychological.

Hylomorphism

A single substantial form (soul) persists through the whole career, securing identity even where memory lapses. Aristotelian-Thomistic personal identity is unaffected by Reid's case.

Reframes the question 4

Analytic Metaphysics / Logical Atomism

Modern psychological-continuity theories (Parfit, Shoemaker) handle Reid via overlapping chains: identity is preserved by ancestral memory connection, not by direct memory.

Naturalism

Biological / physical continuity grounds identity; psychological continuity is a sequel, not the foundation. Reid's case shows the limits of pure-memory accounts.

Buddhism

Anatta: there is no persistent self, only aggregates and conventional designations. Reid's case exposes the Lockean inheritance of substance-thinking even in Locke's nominal opposition to it.

Structuralism

Identity tracks the right *structural* continuity (biological, psychological, narrative); pure memory is one such structure but not the only one.