What Am I? A Contextualist Solution to the Reference Problem for Four-Dimensionalism

We argue that four-dimensionalists should adopt a contextualist semantics about ‘I’, according to which tokens of ‘I’ sometimes refer to stages, sometimes to segments, and sometimes to worms. Our argument relies on an interpretive principle at the root of Kovacs’s diachronic self-making view, according to which ‘I’ refers to the candidate referent that maximizes the truth of an individual’s ‘I’-beliefs. We further argue that this interpretive principle implies that context sensitivity concerns not only what temporal part ‘I’ refers to but also the unity relation (viz., biological continuity or psychological continuity) that interrelates temporal parts. Finally, we show that contextualism is compatible with the view that there is a unique unity relation that matters in survival.