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Individuals Without Sortals

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Michael R. Ayers
Michael R. Ayers*
Affiliation:
Wadham College, Oxford
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Extract

Consideration of the counting and reidentification of particulars leads naturally enough to the orthodox doctrine that, “on pain of indefiniteness,” an identity statement in some way involves or presupposes a general term or “covering concept”: i.e., that the principium individuationis or criterion of identity implied depends upon the kind of thing in question. Thus it is said that an auditor understands the question whether A is the same as B only in so far as he knows, however informally or implicitly, the answer to the supplementary question, “The same what?”

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 4 , Issue 1 , September 1974 , pp. 113 - 148
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1974

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References

1 Wiggins, David Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity (Oxford, 1967), p. 27.Google Scholar

2 Represented, e.g., by Geach on the one side and Quine on the other: vid. Geach, P. T. “Identity,” Review of Metaphysics, XXI (1967)Google Scholar; and Quine, W. V. O. From a Logical Point of View (2nd ed.; New York, 1961 ), pp. 67f.Google Scholar; cf. Perry, John “The Same F,” Philosophical Review, LXXIX (1970).Google Scholar

3 Neither here nor elsewhere am I attempting to define the category of physical object.

4 Wiggins, op. cit., p. 42.

5 A not dissimilar account, which no longer has its author's approval, is given by Wiggins, ibid., pp. 59Google Scholar and 69f.

6 Recourse to a Fregean notion of objectivity will not avoid the point of this characterization: cf. “The objectivity of the North Sea is not affected by the fact that it is a matter of our arbitrary choice which part of all the water on the earth's surface we mark off and elect to call the ‘North Sea'.” (Frege, G.: The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. Austin, J. L. [Oxford, 1968].)Google Scholar For the point is precisely that the spatial and temporal limits of a physical object are not a matter for our arbitrary choice.

7 Another is that the individual must be supposed to have been an f throughout any relevant lapse of time.

8 Cf. Geach, Reference and Generality (Ithaca, N.Y., 1962), p. 157 and p. 10.Google Scholar

9 Further criticism of Geach appears in Perry, op. cit.

10 Cf. ibid., pp. 198f.

11 See footnote 4, above.

12 Shoemaker, S. in “Wiggins on Identity,” Philosophical Review, LXXIX (1970), 531Google Scholar, says that in ordinary language the relation can be expressed by “are one and the same thing” although it is not identity, merely “especially easy to confuse with identity“!

13 Ibid.

14 Goodman, Nelson The Structure of Appearance (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 42–55.Google Scholar

15 Perhaps more so: the claim that space-occupancy individuates has been contested (admittedly without much relevance to the present issue) by an appeal to the alleged logical possibility of one object's passing through another. Such a possibility would not entail the possibility that every part of each should become a part of the other and yet diversity be maintained. (Moreover it is arguable that the passage of A through B is only logically possible on the supposition that at some level each has parts that do not occupy the same space as parts of the other: e.g., atoms.)

16 Cf. Quine, op. cit., pp. 65f.Google Scholar, and Perry, op. cit., p. 199.Google Scholar

17 “Hume on Personal Identity,” Philosophical Review, LXIV (1955). Cf. p. below, on measurement.

18 Principles of Human Knowledge, Part I, § 12.

19 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Book II, Chapter XXVII, § 3. Notice Locke's inconsistent adoption (at any rate, verbal) of both the modern forms of the conceptualist theory. Which of them he would have preferred is not entirely clear from the Essay.

20 The details of Locke's discussion are very interesting, as is the relation between his account of identity and his philosophy of science and notion of substance. The question why Locke, a metaphysical Realist, should adopt a conceptualist view of identity can be answered (and the structure of that view be understood) only in the light of a careful examination of his distinction between real and nominal essences, his discussion of the question whether individuals have essences, his doctrine, more subtle than might appear, that species are the work of the understanding, etc.

21 Op. cit., Part I, § 1.6. The argument here criticised is not, of course, that of Wiggins.

22 A requirement noted by Wiggins, ibid., p. 10.

23 Cf. ibid., Part IV. I should perhaps just indicate a line of response to the argument that the body is a different thing from the man or person because bodies cannot properly be said to think or have sensations. I take it that “body” no more denotes a thing distinct from the person than does “mind” (although minds, unlike people, cannot naturally be said to be six feet tall). As distinctions between substances, I believe that these distinctions should be taken no more seriously than, e.g., a division between “my better self” and “my worse self,” each of which pseudo-selves will necessarily have properties the other lacks. Because such terms are related as it were to “aspects” of a thing, they cannot be freely used to denote the thing in all contexts. Yet there is much to be said for the tough line that, really, my better self sometimes behaves badly and, indeed, that it bears all properties in common with my worse self, for the reason that there are not really two selves or persons but only one. Such ontological pedantry, however, may seem to lose the point of the facon de parler. Similarly the body /person distinction has point, although a good enough reason for asserting that, after all, the body does think is that there are not two things but only one.

24 Cf. Sellars, W. “The Identity Approach to the Mind-Body Problem,” Review of Metaphysics, XVIII (1965), §IV.Google Scholar

25 No doubt a fact related to the point of footnote 23, above.

26 Op. cit., p. 28.

27 Frege criticizes Mill for believing that “two and one pair are the same thing” (ibid., p. 33) but fails to grasp that the notion of a pair of boots is at least parasitic on that of a number of boots, i.e., is a group concept.

28 Ibid., p. 59.

29 Ibid., p. 62.

30 Ibid., p. 66.

31 Ibid., p. 42.

32 Cf. Price, H. H. Hume's Theory of the External World, pp. 45–48Google Scholar; and Penelhum, op. cit.

33 Compare a point made against phenomenalism, e.g., by Berlin, I. in “Empirical Propositions and Hypothetical Statements,” Mind (1950).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

34 My thanks are due to all those who have commented on earlier drafts, and especially to Terence Penelhum to whom I owe some fundamental points.