Why I have no hands

Bibliographic Data

ID20142987
AuthorsEric T Olson (University of Cambridge, corresponding author)
Year1995
Volume61
Issue2
Pages182-197
Publication date1995-08-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueTheoria (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0040-5825 • E-ISSN: 1755-2567
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1755-2567.1995.tb00496.x
OpenAlexW2085570681
LanguageEN
Citations received20
References cited12

[FIRST PARAGRAPH] Consider the following argument for the claim that there are no hands--or feet \nor ears or any other arbitrary parts of human beings. \n \n \nPremise One: I am the only rational, conscious being--for short, the only person-- \nnow sitting in this chair. \n \n \nTrust me: my chair isn't big enough for two. You may doubt that every rational, \nconscious being is a person; perhaps there are beings that mistakenly believe \nthemselves to be people. If so, read ‘rational, conscious being’ or the like for \n'person'. \n \n \nPremise Two: Anything that would be rational and conscious in one environment \ncould not fail to be rational or conscious in another environment \nwithout differing internally in some way. \n \n \nNothing can fail to be rational or conscious merely by having the wrong relational \nproperties. All philosophers of mind except perhaps dualists and eliminative \nmaterialists make this assumption. The content of someone's intentional states \nmight be sensitive to her surroundings: on Twin Earth there may be someone \nwhose mind is just like yours except that your thoughts about water correspond in \nhim or her to thoughts about something else, if the colourless, potable liquid called \n'water' on Twin Earth is not H2O but a substance with a different chemical \ncomposition. But unless mental features are not caused by physical ones, that being \ncould hardly fail to be rational or conscious at all, if you are rational and conscious. \n \n \nPremise Three: If there is such a thing as my hand, there is also such a thing as my \n"hand-complement": an object made up or composed of just \nthose parts of me that don't share a part with my hand. [1] \n \n \nIf my hand exists, then "the rest of me but for my hand" exists as well. (I assume \nthat I am a material object, and that my hand, if it existed, would be a part of me.) \n2 \nThis is just to say that there is nothing ontologically special about hands: saying that \nthere are hands but no hand-complements would be as arbitrary as saying that \nthere are hands but no feet. Any reasonable ontology of material objects that gives \nus hands gives us hand-complements as well. This might sound less than obvious \nbecause 'hand' is a familiar, compact word of ordinary English, while 'handcomplement' \nis philosophical jargon. But that is an accidental feature of our \nlanguage, and presumably reflects our interest in hands and our lack of interest in \nhand-complements. There is no reason to suppose that it has any ontological \nsignificance. Consider that 'cheir' in ancient Greek and 'manus' in Latin, the words \nthat dictionaries translate as 'hand', actually meant something that included eight or \nten inches of forearm. Strictly speaking, the ancient Greeks and Romans had no \nword for what we call hands. But that does not imply that they disagreed with us \nabout what material objects there are

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