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.
2. Gretchen Weirob is arguing for the conclusion that it is not possible for her to survive. This is an extrememly strong conclusion. How can it be proven that anything besides a contradiction is actually impossible? Is there any way Gretchen can soundly conclude that her survival is truly impossible?

Reconstruction from Perry's Dialogue on Personal Identity

Sample Paper on Perry's Dialogue