This contribution to a series on The History and Philosophy of Biology has just one expository chapter directly on the latter topic, focussing instead, as its title indicates, on the role biological individuals are asked to play in David Wiggins’ theorising about individuation and identity, and personal identity in particular. Ferner is an enthusiastic admirer of Wiggins’ thought, tending to ascribe others’ objections to misunderstanding, but he is not entirely uncritical. He aims not only to elucidate Wiggins’ long-maturing theory of personal identity for those put off by the ‘baroque elegance’ of his style, but also to identify difficulties it faces and to offer ways of meeting them.

A first chapter endeavours to place Wiggins’ theory in context, seeing it as continuous with Peter Strawson's ‘descriptive metaphysics’, the analysis of the structure of the ‘conceptual scheme’ we have rather than a ‘revisionary’ attempt to map the structure of reality independently of that scheme. Against claims that there is not, or may not be any common conceptual scheme Ferner argues that, even if there is no universal grammar, there must be some common ‘framework’ to human thought since there are no linguistic communities with whom others cannot get into communication. Wiggins’ subject-matter, Ferner suggests, is that ‘framework’, but Wiggins’ conceptualism is at the same time ‘realist’, since he recognises that the framework ‘has developed through a reciprocal engagement with reality’. Nevertheless, Ferner approves Wiggins’ ‘verdant realism’, a rather un-Strawsonian acceptance that other (for example, four-dimensionalist) frameworks will serve to pick out individuals that are as ‘real’ as the ‘substances’ picked out by our common pre-theoretical framework. He makes no reference to Strawson's ‘transcendental’ arguments, although Wiggins’ appeal to the exigencies of the logic of identity might appear analogous.

What Ferner doesn't say about the context in which Wiggins first formed his views is that everybody who discussed identity and individuation, whatever their brand of analytic philosophy, was a sortalist or, at least, conceptualist of some kind, not only Strawson, but Quine, Wittgenstein, Hampshire, and Geach (a main target of Wiggins’ first book), to name but a few. Behind at least much of this stood the work of Frege, pressed on students at Oxford in the fifties and the object of translations by leading linguistic philosophers, Austin (1950), Quinton, and Geach and Black (1952). (Beginners were set to read Locke on identity and diversity.) Michael Dummett, soon hugely influential at Oxford, advised Geach and Black on their 1960 second edition and published the product of years of work on Frege's philosophy of language in 1973. We should not be surprised if it was possible for Wiggins to assume in 1967 that what needed doing in the theory of the identity of material things over time was not to justify or question a sortalist or conceptualist approach, but to tidy it up, freeing it from the paradoxes of Geach's position and from the charge of idealism, all done with a Fregean denigration of any ‘indeterminacy’ of concept or judgement. There was no more fundamental challenge around to be met.

Wiggins’ famously successful strategy against Geach was to argue that what is sortal-relative is individuation, not, as Geach held, the identity-relation itself. We can't, allegedly, pick out any material object without a concept that embodies a principle of individuation, and the principle of individuation serves also as a principle of identity over time. The individual picked out continues to exist as long as an individual of the same kind is spatio-temporally continuous with that individual. That means that to pick out an enduring individual such as undergoes change that individual must embody a ‘principle of activity’ of a kind that determines a characteristic life-history, ‘a particular kind of path through space and time’, even if in a particular case that path is cut short. Otherwise there will be no principle for distinguishing between the individual's changing and its ceasing to exist, being replaced by something else. The sortals we employ to pick out such individuals Wiggins calls substance-sortals, and the paradigm, only truly ‘determinate’ natural individuals so picked out are biological individuals, although functionally defined names of artifacts can count as substance-sortals by analogy. To accept lower standards for individuation is at least to vere towards accepting that a continuity of ‘bare space-occupying matter’ is the continuity of a material individual, if not the ‘realist myth of the self-differentiating object (the object which announces itself as the very object it is to any mind, however passive and of whatever orientation)’ (Sameness and Substance Renewed, 150–1; Ferner, 29.) Aristotelian overtones (despite the conceptualism) are non-accidental.

The idea of a reciprocal relationship between concepts and reality caused early problems. A draft of Identity and Spatio-temporal Continuity raised the question how, if the sortal Leptocephalus determined when an individual ceased to exist, it was only later discovered that Leptocephali are actually young conger eels. Wiggins responded in an appendix with a bit of awkward play with the notion of a ‘porous sortal’, somehow indeterminate between a phase-sortal and a sortal, but that idea lasted, as far as I know, for just that one paragraph. He perhaps heaved a sigh of relief when Putnam and Kripke proposed that substance-sortals, names of natural kinds, can be introduced demonstratively, via instances, allowing that we can latch onto a kind without knowing the associated life-history, so long as there is one determined by a ‘real essence’. That alliance, however, increased vulnerability to the charge of old-fashioned essentialism (another criticism Ferner ascribes to misunderstanding).

Ferner himself is more concerned to improve on Wiggins’ response to Shoemaker's ‘brain transplant’ argument for the neo-Lockean distinction between the human animal and the person. Wiggins distinguishes ‘person’ as a substance-sortal different in sense from ‘human being’, but coincident with it in that the only persons (people?) we know of are human beings. Personal self-consciousness is characteristic of human life and the person, qua subject of consciousness, experiences itself as a material, substantial human being in a world with other such beings, and the life-history it is conscious of as its own is one that is natural to human beings. Organ transplantation endangers this picture in so far as it is has no place in the natural life-history of animals. Nevertheless, faced with the extreme, if perhaps possible case of brain (or, presumably, head) transplantation, we ought to be no more ready to suppose that the person survives with the transplanted brain than to suppose that the human being does (as we do in the case of, say, kidney or hand transplants) – or no less ready to suppose the latter than the former. Wiggins’ most cogent line of argument in Sameness and Substance Renewed for supposing neither and, in particular, for rejecting the view that the person survives but the human being doesn't, is that that would make ‘person’ something other than a substance-sortal, so that, for example (since ‘quasi-memory’ of a life-history could be multiply reproduced) ‘is the same person as’ becomes like ‘is a clone of’. Or perhaps we could introduce a use of ‘person’ as the name of a kind of biological artifact, stipulatively defining it by the very specific function of, as it were, subjectively continuous self-consciousness, where the ‘self’ is an individual of just that artifact-kind – a quite different way of thinking of ourselves from the one Wiggins takes himself to have found embodied in the common framework, and one of which he strongly disapproves.

Ferner goes beyond exposition and defence with three connected arguments. First, he offers a ‘genealogy of the person concept’ to argue, as is plausible enough without the genealogy, that the concept should be understood not as a sortal, but as what Wiggins calls a phase-sortal. In the nature of things, human beings become and may cease to be, persons, as they become and cease to be adolescents, bakers, or actors playing particular parts (dramatis personae). Second, he describes various attempts by philosophers of biology to state precise boundary conditions for biological individuals – the ‘physiological-functional’, ‘genetic’, ‘epigenetic’, ‘autonomy’, or ‘immunological’ accounts – and interprets them, in a way supposed consonant with Wiggins’ ‘verdant ontology’, as each issuing in a class of sortals that pick out material individuals distinct from those picked out by the others and by Wiggins’ pre-theoretical ‘substance-sortals’ (although the last, he thinks, approximates to the ‘physiological-functional’ account). Finally, more impressed than Wiggins by Shoemaker's argument, he runs with the notion that transplantation of, at least, vital organs is not survived by the human animal, but that another entity, a biological artifact capable of surviving disassembly of parts, can continue to fill the role (previously shared, presumably, with that animal) of being a person. Thus an animal person doesn't survive but an artifact person does. Thinking of ourselves as animals is out of date:

I don't imagine Wiggins would be happy with this kind of easy-going, pragmatistic view of ontology, and I suspect that his ‘verdant ontology’ has been misunderstood. I take it that his objection to the entity composed of Losonsky's left ear and the moon is not that it doesn't exist, but that it is not an individual in any important sense. Nor need he agree with Ferner that the five different accounts of what a biological individual is pick out five different, materially overlapping individual substances where we normally think that we have, for example, one tiger, since he could reasonably argue that there is in the case just one ‘principle of activity’ the limits of which are precisely the topic of the debate. But it is not entirely easy to predict how Wiggins would or will respond to Ferner's ‘biological artifact’ move, since his argument against it in Sameness and Substance Renewed does seem sometimes to reduce to the question, ‘Do we really want to think of ourselves like that?’ – which seems to leave it open to Ferner to ask ‘Why not?’

In my own view, a better approach to these issues requires us to escape from the universal conceptualism not seriously questioned in this book. Wiggins’ own procedure suggests a good starting-point – the epistemology of individuation. He claims that we cannot pick out any determinate material thing without a specific answer to the question ‘What is it?’ such as supplies a principle of identity over time – i.e., without a ‘sortal concept’. But at the epistemologically fundamental level of perception such a claim is implausible or, at best, controversial, and psychological work on the integration of the senses strongly supports the fairly common-sense view that coherent, solid, discrete material things are among the most basic objects of not just pre-theoretical, but pre-conceptual perceptual experience. The identity of objects of sight with solid, resistent objects of touch, for example, is something given in animal experience itself, not something arrived at by thought or imposed on the data of perception by ‘concepts’. So too with the distinction between oneself and other material things. Much of what Strawson ascribes to our ‘conceptual scheme’ is, as Austin Clark puts it, ‘built into our sensory mechanisms’ – mechanisms evolved in relation to how things are. In discussing Snowdon's criticism that Wiggins’ association of individuation and identity conflates psychology with metaphysics – how we in fact pick things out with what must be the case for an identity to obtain – Ferner does consider Snowdon's point that we can readily pick out material objects without knowing what they are. He argues that what Wiggins means by ‘individuation’ is more than that, since nothing determinate is individuated without there being a principle to determine what would count as picking out the same object again. Although that may well seem a mere assertion doctrinae causa, we can agree with Wiggins that in some sense a ‘principle of individuation’ brings along with it a principle of identity over time. But all that need imply is that (to put it crudely) a materially unitary, coherent, discrete physical object continues to exist as long as it remains coherent and discrete. Ferner brings the alleged ‘pervasiveness of material coincidence’ in aid, but the distinction between, say, an individual unitary object and the categorically different quantity of matter that composes it is not a distinction between two material objects. Nor is a jug an object distinct from the piece of china that composes it – it is (identical with) that piece of china. For unitary material objects, the mereological principle that a = b iff every part of each is a part of the other holds synchronically, but not diachronically. Hence the traditional principle that substances ‘exist all at once’ and, indeed, the possibility that they can lose and gain parts. It is an aspect of the categorical distinction between enduring objects and processes.

Causation is important in other ways than sheer, or mere, coherence, although it is coherence that constitutes the fundamental fact about material individuals as such: they are physically unitary and discrete, with natural, given, relatively lasting spatial boundaries, edges, surfaces, limits that on the one hand are independent of human conceptualisation, and on the other hand are at least commonly evident to human perception. Indeed in general one's integrated perceptual experience is at the same time an awareness of oneself as a discrete material object in relation to a material environment, not least to other discrete, concrete material objects. If it wasn't, we probably wouldn't last long. Nevertheless mere coherence isn't enough – witness the distinction we would all make between a tree and the nail it has grown to enclose. A cannon-ball and the lump of chewing gum stuck to it do not make one material object. The causation of the coherence must be taken into account, not only with respect to the different ways in which the parts of (e.g.) the nail and the tree hang together, but also, more importantly, the different origins and history of these two coherent objects – the explanation of how they each came be as they are. The tree grew, as trees do, from a seed, the nail had a quite independent origin. Their coming together was ‘accidental’. The broad principle of the relevance of causal history to questions of the identity and diversity of material objects at a time and over time is the same whether the unitary objects are animals or pebbles (or bars of soap). Suppose a bar of soap at t2 is composed of (say) half the soap that composed a bar at t1. Whether they are the same bar, whether there is ‘continuity’, may depend on how the diminution occurred – whether it was by the bar's being gradually worn away, for example, or by it's being cut in half. With this broad principle of the relevance of causality in hand, we have reason to judge (contra the ‘immunological’ account) that, for example, whereas leucocytes are parts of the living organism, symbiotic bacteria are not. Human beings will also have reason to judge that, whatever the future achievements of transplant surgery, they are animals that came into existence as animals. (Incidentally, some of the issues raised by transplant surgery were discussed in the 17^th century, and perhaps before, in relation to the ancient practice of grafting.)

As I have argued elsewhere, to grant that determinate, discrete material objects can be picked out prior to any conception of a kind to which they belong allows a more accurate understanding of the classification or grouping of biological individuals as a ‘bottom-up’, individuals-first procedure based on other factors than a supposed universal internal structure or essence – for example, relational considerations of consanguinity or origin. It also allows a sharper appreciation of the striking, widely ignored logical differences between the individuation and classification of ‘substances’ and the top-down, concepts-first classification and individuation of ‘modes’ such as events and processes. Does it also help us solve the problem supposedly raised by brain transplant stories and the like in relation to personal identity? I take it that that ‘problem’, if that is what it is, is unique and quite intelligibly so – not to be assimilated to the ‘problem’ of Theseus’ ship or the like. For the core of the Lockean argument hinges on the logical possibility of separating the physical seat of the human animal's awareness of its bodily self and of its history from the intimate objects of that awareness and knowledge. The undoubted importance of the brain to life is irrelevant. It is difficult to see, once what is supposed is fully described in those terms, what metaphysical question remains, whatever the force of the question, ‘which would you rather be, brain-donor or brain-recipient?’ I certainly can't see that the presumably popular answer, ‘brain-donor’, receives any kind of metaphysical endorsement from a sortalism that distinguishes the self-aware animal from a different entity, whether a ‘person’ or a ‘biological artifact’.