Abstract

Why is this life actually mine rather than another? Ordinary reflection often takes an inchoate form: as though something had to fall to this life rather than another, and its being “here” made the first-person difference. I call the explanatory commitment implicit in that picture the distribution model. In the reconstruction, a candidate x bears a relation to an eligible center, and the relation is asked to ground the stronger first-person actuality contrast. Once the admitted background is fixed, varying only where x bears the relation does not entail a corresponding change in the target. That change follows only from a target-sensitive grounding principle. Reassignment can display and test the principle’s modal consequences, but cannot independently establish it: the movement of the target is licensed by the very connection at issue. Hare’s egocentric presentism supplies a genuine assignment structure—a monadic first-person privilege relocatable across physically identical subject worlds—without using that structure to explain Nagai’s stronger target. List’s many-worlds theory marks a different boundary: first-person realism need not adopt distributional explanatory syntax at all. The argument leaves open a structured primitive ground while identifying the legitimate use and the evidential limit of reassignment.