Personal identity: a counterfactual approach to psycho-behavioral habit

Abstract

In this article, I try, based on the General Systems Theory and Peirce’s Philosophy, to defend that personal identity can be thought of as a property emerging from the set of habits of an agent embodied and embedded in the world. I also argue that the counterfactual conditional ‘If it were the case that A, then it would be the case that B’ constitutes an appropriate logical form to represent, or model, the dynamics of expression of the psychobehavioral habit; the counterfactual conditional would be implemented in the agent’s psychobehavioral structure as an organization arrangement. In previous articles, I worked with the hypothesis that the habit could be formally represented either by the relevant implication or by a variably strict conditional. This is the first article that I work with the hypothesis of the representation of the habit as a counterfactual conditional. The defense of the counterfactual conditional as a logical form of habit is made in analogy with the dynamics of manifestation of the laws of nature and biological conditionals.