2 th - century theories of personal identity One possible answer is that these experiences are somehow held together by the same substance: perhaps an immaterial substance, a soul David Hume ([1739] 1978, 252) famously stated, however, that no such entity can be observed: what one finds by looking into one’s own mind (arguably the natural place to look) are just numerous perceptions; one does not find, in addition to these perceptions, a bearer of them, let alone an immaterial bearer For an empiricist, it would be ideal to instead be able to answer the question by appeal to some mental relation And Grice (1941) offers just such an answer: these two experiences, he suggests, are had by the same person because they can be known by introspection to be simultaneous If you are now in pain, your pain is of course simultaneous with my present experiences, but this is not something that can be known by introspection; by contrast, the simultaneity of your pain and your other present experiences can be so known On Grice’s view, this is not because they are all yours; rather, they are all yours because they can be so known The psychological-continuity view is a natural development of this suggestion What makes it the case that a certain present experience belongs to the same person as a certain past or future experience? Not, friends of the view insist, their being tied to the same substance (let alone the same immaterial substance), but simply their being elements of the same chain of mental events They not belong to this chain because one and the same person has them; rather, they are had by the same person because they belong to this chain Another consideration often thought, at least at first sight, to support the psychological-continuity view, is that it is, after all, an account of personal identity; and the concept of a person is evidently a psychological one According to Locke’s influential account, for instance, a person is “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing, in different times and places” ([1690] 1975, 335) As a result, it may be charged that non-psychological approaches to personal identity over time – such as the “bodily” view that sameness of body is necessary and sufficient for personal identity over time – must be based on some kind of conceptual confusion In fact, however, the confusion lies in this very charge (Olson 1997, 29–30) For even if the concept of a person is a psychological one, this does not mean that psychological features are relevant to a person’s persistence The fact that an individual satisfies a certain concept does not entail that the concept is involved in his identity conditions; after all, a pianist can stop being a pianist without ceasing to exist, and a child can continue to live to old age Of course, advocates of the psychological-continuity view will hold that the concept of a person is special: it is a “substance concept” – a concept that provides the identity conditions for all things falling under it But appealing to this claim would be question-begging against opponents of the view; it ought not to persuade anyone not already inclined to believe that psychology is relevant to personal identity over time The primary reason to accept the psychological-continuity view is that it gives the intuitively correct verdicts in cases in which a person’s psychology is transferred to another body, whereas competing views – most obviously the bodily approach – have the opposite implications Anthony Quinton’s influential 1962 129