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Objections to Perry's Argument When your assignment in a philosophy paper is to analyze an argument, you'll be expected both to explicate the argument (that is, to identify its premises and conclusion and to determine whether it is valid) and to evaluate it critically (that is, consider whether its premises are true by examining and evaluating reasons for thinking that at least some of them are false). Here we have concentrated only on the prior task of explicating an argument: it is prior because if you don't know what the conclusion of the argument is or what premises support it, you'll be hard pressed to find good objections. And, once again, things are not always quite as easy as they seem: you'll find, for example, that sometimes you need to consider the truth or the plausibility of the premises in order to reconstruct an argument well. Here we'll only mention a few points that might give rise to reasonable objections to Perry's argument. We could only see how powerful these objections are by spelling them out more fully and considering what Perry’s response would be. Objections to John Perry's argument as presented in A Dialogue on Personal Identity, pages 27-30 1. Gretchen Weirob argues that Miller's argument is circular. The definition
of a circular argument is one in which one of the premises is the same
as the conclusion. It seems that, by this definition, Miller's argument,
while flawed, is not strictly speaking a circular one. |