Harold W. Noonan

INDETERMINATE IDENTITY, CONTINGENT IDENTITY AND ABELARDIAN PREDICATES

Evanss reasoning provides, in essence, a conclusive argument for the view that indeterminacy in identity statements must be regarded as due to semantic indeterminacy and not as due to indeterminacy in the world. But there are various reasons why some philosophers are reluctant to endorse this conclusion. In what follows I wish to consider one such reason, namely, the evident availability, if Evanss argument is accepted, of an apparently parallel argument against the possibility of contingent identity. I shall be arguing that the appearance of parallelism is illusory, a fact which can be made evident by attention to the linguistic phenomenon of (what I wish to call) Abelardian predicates.

Animalism Versus Lockeanism: A Current Controversy

My purpose is to explore the possible lines of reply available to a defender of the neo-Lockean position on personal identity in response to the recently popular ‘animalist’ objection. I compare the animalist objection with an objection made to Locke by Bishop Butler, Thomas Reid and, in our own day, Sydney Shoemaker. I argue that the only possible response available to a defender of Locke against the Butler–Reid–Shoemaker objection is to reject Lockes official definition of a person as a thinking, intelligent thing and replace it with the concept of the self– the object of self-reference – and that this response is equally obligatory for the neo-Lockean in replying to the animalist. I explore other possibilities, including the position that there is no sense in talking about personal identity at all.

The closest continuer theory of identity

A plausible principle governing identity is that whether a later individual is identical with an earlier individual cannot ever merely depend on whether there are, at the later time, any better candidates for identity with the earlier individual around. This principle has been a bone of contention amongst philosophers interested in identity for many years. In his latest book Philosophical Explanations Robert Nozick presents what I believe to be the strongest case yet made out for the rejection of this principle. My aim in this paper is to argue, with reference in particular to personal and artefact identity, that Nozicks case can be met and that a theory of identity which entails the correctness of this principle is the equal, indeed the superior, in explanatory power of the theory Nozick develops on the basis of its rejection.

Objects and identity : an examination of the relative identity thesis and its consequences

1. Absolute and Relative Identity.- 2. Diachronic Identity as Relative Identity.- 3. Sychronic Identity as Relative Identity.- 4. Quine on Synchronic Identity.- 5. Sortal Concepts and Identity.- 6. On the Notion of a Criterion of Identity.- 7. Absolute Identity and Criteria of Identity.- 8. Restricted and Unrestricted Quantification.- 9. Absolute Identity and Criteria of Identity Concluded.- 10. Events, Continuants and Diachronic Identity.- 11. Counterpart Theory and the Necessity of Identity.- 12. Absolute and Relative Identity Concluded.- 13. Can One Thing Become Two?.- 14. Memory and Quasi-Memory.- 15. Locke on Personal Identity.

The epistemological problem of relativism -reply to olson

In his challenging discussion of relativist views of personal identity (1997) Eric Olson considers various ways of defending the popular view that as things are certain things we say about personal identity are false but would have been true if we had thought and spoken differently. One way of clarifying this view which he considers involves acceptance of a capacious ontology of rational beings with ambiguity of reference (1997, p. 159). But this strategy, he argues, brings with it a vexing epistemological problem, so that even if its ontology and semantics can be accepted it does not provide the relativist with a satisfactory way of defending his position. In what follows I argue that Olson is wrong to think that the capacious ontology strategy brings with it the epistemological puzzles he describes and argue that its ontological commitments are ones that have to be accepted by anyone - relativist or not - given certain plausible, and widely accepted assumptions about vagueness, identity and the character of the psychological.

Sortal Concepts and Identity

Of course, a defender of Wiggins’ position is not yet without resource. For he can point out that while Wiggins says he is defending Leibniz’s Law, what he is actually concerned to defend is the distinct principle that identity under a sortal concept entails indiscernibility (stated by him on page 3 of his book as “\((a\mathop = \limits_f b) \supset (\phi )(\phi a \equiv \phi b)\)” and there confusingly called “Leibniz’s Law”). Now this principle has to be abandoned if one accepts the claims that same man and same cat are relative equivalence relations, so if there is some reason why this principle should not be abandoned this constitutes an objection to these claims and also a justification, if like Wiggins one finds Quine’s four-dimensional ontology unpalatable, for denying that Pis now a man or that Tib is a cat when Tibbles has lost his tail.

The New Aristotelian Essentialists

Abstract In recent years largely due to the seminal work of Kit Fine and that of Jonathan Lowe there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of essence and the project of explaining de re necessity in terms of it. Of course, Quine rejected what he called Aristotelian essentialism in his battle against quantified modal logic. But what he and Kripke debated was a notion of essence defined in terms of de re necessity. The new Aristotelian essentialists regard essence as entailing but prior in the order of explanation to de re necessity. In what follows I argue that the concept of essence so understood has not been adequately explained and that any attempt to explain it, at least along the lines most familiar from the literature, must be flagrantly circular or make use of de re modal notions.

Additional reflections on Putnam, Wright and Brains in Vats

Abstract Putnam’s argument against the sceptical Brain-in-a-Vat hypothesis continues to intrigue. I argue in what follows that the argument refutes a particular kind of sceptic and make a proposal about its more general significance. To appreciate the soundness of the argument, I explain, we need to appreciate that the sceptic’s contention is that I cannot know that I am not a brain in a vat even if I am not. This is why in response to the sceptic it is legitimate to make a transition from knowing that a sentence is true to knowing the truth it expresses, which is the crucial move in the argument.

The Passage of Time

Abstract Eric Olson argues that the dynamic view of time must be false. It requires that the question ‘How fast does time pass?’ has an answer. But its only possible answer, one second per second, is not an answer. I argue that Olson has failed to identify what is wrong with talk of time’s passage. Then I argue that, nonetheless, he is right to reject it. To say that time passes is analogous to saying that space is dense, and to ask about the rate of time’s passage is analogous to asking how dense space is. Since the questions are on a par the dynamic view of time, which requires that they are not, is mistaken.

Castles Built on Clouds: Vague Identity and Vague Objects

Can identity itself be vague? Can there be vague objects? Does a positive answer to either question entail a positive answer to the other? In this chapter, we answer these questions as follows: no, no, and yes. First, we discuss Evans’s famous 1978 argument and argue that the main lesson that it imparts is that identity itself cannot be vague. We defend the argument from objections and endorse this conclusion. We acknowledge, however, that the argument does not by itself establish either that there cannot be vague objects or that there cannot be identity statements that are indeterminate for ontic reasons. And we further acknowledge that it does not by itself establish that there cannot be identity statements that are indeterminate in virtue of the existence of vague objects. We then go on to argue that, despite this, one who believes in vague objects cannot endorse Evans’s argument. To establish this we offer supplementary arguments that show that if vague objects exist then identity is vague, and that if identity is vague then vague objects exist. Finally we draw attention to an argument parallel to that of Evans’s, but safer, which can be employed against the putative ontic indeterminacy in identity of vague objects which can be differentiated by identity-free properties.