CONCEPT
Identification
Frankfurt's technical term for the decisive commitment through which a person makes a desire genuinely their own — the act that converts mere higher-order endorsement into authoritative structure and terminates the regress that threatens the hierarchical account of freedom.
Identification is the concept that does the heaviest work in Frankfurt's mature framework. A person has many first-order desires. A person can form second-order desires about those first-order desires. But what gives the second-order desires authority? Why should they command the first-order? Frankfurt's answer, developed most fully in 'Identification and Wholeheartedness' (1987), is that authority derives from identification — the person's decisive commitment to treat a particular desire as their own. Identification is not merely preference or endorsement. It is the settled resolution that terminates reflection and establishes the desire as authoritative for action.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The problem identification solves is structural. Without some terminating commitment, the hierarchy of desires threatens to regress infinitely: if second-order desires derive authority from third-order endorsement, and third-order from fourth-order, no desire is ever authoritative. Frankfurt saw that the regress must stop somewhere, and that where it stops is itself a matter of the person's