Wiggins, Identity, Individuation and Substance

Identity, Individuation and Substance

David Wiggins

Abstract: The paper takes off from the problem of finding a proper content for therelation of identity as it holds or fails to hold among ordinary things orsubstances. The necessary conditions of identity are familiar, the sufficientconditions less so. The search is for conditions at once better usable than theLeibnizian Identity of Indiscernibles (independently suspect) and strong enoughto underwrite all the formal properties of the relation.

It is contended that the key to this problem rests at the level of metaphysicsand epistemology alike with a sortalist position. Sortalism is the position whichinsists that, if the question is whether a and b are the same, it has to be askedwhat are they? Any sufficiently specific answer to that question will bring with ita principle of activity or functioning and a mode of behaviour characteristic ofsome particular kind of thing by reference to which questions of persistence ornon-persistence through change can be adjudicated.

These contentions are illustrated by reference to familiar examples such as thehuman zygote, the Ship of Theseus and Shoemakers Brown-Brownson. The firstexample is hostage for a mass of unproblematical cases. The problems presentedby the second and third sort of examples arise chiefly (it is claimed) from anincompleteness in our conceptions of the relevant sortthe what the thing inquestion is. That incompleteness need not prevent us from knowing perfectly wellwhich thing we are referring to. In the concluding section, sortalism is defendedagainst various accusations of anthropocentrism.

The paper touches on the interpretation of Heraclitus, Leibnizs theory of clearindistinct ideas, the difficulties of David Lewiss perdurantist or stroboscopicview of persistence, four-dimensionalism, and the relation of personal identityboth to experiential memory and to the particular bodily physiognomy of asubject. At some pointsas in connection with the so-called Only a and brulethe paper corrects, supplements or extends certain theses or formulationsproposed in the authors Sameness and Substance Renewed (2001).

1.

My subject is identity and individuation. By identity I mean being the same as.By individuation I mean something done by a thinker. Among acts of individu-ation I include (1) singling out something which is a g (a donkey, say) as a g; (2)distinguishing that g from other gs; (3) singling something out when comingupon it again and recognizing it as that g, the same g again.1 It will appear indue course how I take identity and individuation to be connected. By asubstance I intend, with tradition, something singular or individual. Unlike auniversal/type/sort/ kind/clone/character, a substance does not have speci-mens or instances. Nothing falls under it, exemplifies it or instantiates it.2

DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-0378.2012.00516.x

European Journal of Philosophy 20:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 125 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 9600 Garsington Road,Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

Forty four years ago I published a short monograph called Identity andSpatio-Temporal Continuity, henceforth ISTC (Wiggins 1967). Once I saw it in print,I started putting one or two things right. From this process arose Sameness andSubstance, henceforth S&S, (Wiggins 1980) and later Sameness and SubstanceRenewed, henceforth S&SR (Wiggins 2001). Ten years further on, noting the virtualdisappearance of the sortalist view of identity from present day discussions, Iwonder sometimes whether the third of these efforts was found to be unreadable.What I know for certain is that, over the passage of time, the philosophical scenehas changed. It is no longer wise to assume, as I was apt to do, that everyone witha serious interest in the metaphysics of identity will know Aristotles distinctionbetween what a thing is (i.e. what fundamental kind of thing it is) and what thething is like, or be eager to read such texts as Categories, Chapters 15. Nor can theother Aristotelian resonances by which I once set such store be relied upon anylonger to enlighten or remind. If they have any effect, it is rather to discredit theclaim to have arrived at a perfectly general accountan account not at odds withanything that modern science reveals to usof the identity and individuation ofobjects which are extended in space and persist through time.

So putting to one side the insights of Aristotlewho will enter now only atthe point where the argument simply forces our attention onto himwe shallproceed here more simply and single-mindedly, starting from the bare logic ofthe identity relation and setting the still underestimated requirements of thatlogic in authority over the judgements of same and other into which we areconstrained by the effort to make sense of the world of perpetual alteration inwhich we have to find our way.

2.

In partial illustration of the extent and nature of the perpetual alterationaforesaid, let me set the scene for our enquiry by drawing from a work of sciencewhich was as important in its day as it was lucid of expression:

[In the living animal] the large and complex molecules and theircomponent units are constantly involved in rapid chemical reactions . . .Part of the pool of newly formed small molecules constantly re-entersvacant places in the large molecules to restore the fats, the proteins, andthe nucleoproteins . . . Components of an animal are rapidly degradedinto specific molecular groupings which may wander from one place toanother. The chemical reactions must be balanced so delicately that,through regeneration, the body components remain constant in totalamount and in structure. . . . All regeneration reactions must be enzy-matic in nature. The large molecules, such as the fats and the proteins,are, under the influence of lytic enzymes, constantly being degraded totheir constituent fragments. These changes are balanced by syntheticprocesses which must be coupled to other chemical reactions, such as

David Wiggins2

2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

oxidation or dephosphorylation. After death, when the oxidativesystems disappear, the synthetic processes also cease, and the unbal-anced degradative reactions lead to the collapse of the thermodynami-cally unstable structural elements. In general, every regenerationreaction involving an increase in free energy must be coupled withanother process. In order to maintain structure against its tendency tocollapse, work has to be done. The replacement of a brick fallen from awall requires energy, and in the living organism energy debts are paidby chemical reactions . . . (Schoenheimer 1942: 624)

In other words:

All constituents of living matter, whether functional or structural, ofsimple of complex constitution, are in steady state of rapid flux. (Ibid.: 3)

Heraclitus, the first Western thinker to recognize the cosmic significance ofchange, is commonly reputed to have denied, precisely on the basis of theprocesses of change, all possibility of identity through change. But he did notdeny it:

Upon those who step into the same rivers different and again differentwaters flow. The waters scatter and gather, come together and flowaway, approach and depart. (Fragments 12 and 91, as reunited byGeoffrey Kirk in Kirk 1954)

On the view I take of Heraclitus, it was the maintenance or perpetuation of theworld orderand within that order the persistence through time of things suchas rivers (the same rivers)that Heraclitus set out to describe, redescribe andexplain.3 However obscurely or allusively his account of these matters antici-pates Schoenheimers. But one will understand these accounts best if one doesnot misconstrue the common sense of identity.

3.

We begin upon that common sense with the bare logic of the relation. First wehave the obvious truth where everybody begins, the reflexivity of identity:

For all x, x is the same thing as x.

In second place, we have Leibnizs principle, the Indiscernibility of Identicals.This requires that, if x is the same thing as y, then x and y have all the sameproperties:

If x is identical with y, then x is F if and only if y is F4

From these two principles, taken together, there follow the symmetry andtransitivity of identity. Suppose x = y and y = z. Then x has any property y has.But y is z. So x is z. That gives transitivity. Now symmetry. Suppose x = y. Then

Identity, Individuation and Substance 3


y has any property x has. One of xs properties is being the same as x. So y toohas that property. So y is x.

There are three further consequences. The first is the necessity of identity:

If x is the same thing as y, then x is

necessarily the same thing as y.

Proof: x is necessarily x. So, by the Indiscernibility principle, the object y has thesame property as x has, namely the property of being necessarily the same thingas x.5 Moreover the very same scheme of argument guarantees the absolutedeterminacy of identity6:

If x is the same thing as y, then x is

absolutely and determinately the same thing as y

For x is absolutely and determinately the same thing as x. Similarly we have thepermanence of identity:

If x is the same thing as y then x is always the same thing as y.

Proof. x is always the same thing as x. So y, which is the same as x, hasxs property of always having x identical with it.

4.

What flows from these findings?Downwind from the necessity of identity we have the thought that, if x is

the same thing as y, then their identity will hold regardless of how mattersstand with other things. The identity of x with y will not then involve ordepend upon anything that is different from or independent of x or y. Theidentity of x and y may of course be discovered in all sorts of ways thatinvolve reference to other things, but constitutively the identity of x and yinvolves only x and y.7

Downwind from the Indiscernibility Principle itself we have an AdequacyRequirement: whatever grounds the identity of x with y must ipso facto, and bythat same token, ground the indiscernibility of x and y.8 It follows that, in thepresence of an adequate reason to think that x is the same as y, one of the thingswe must be able to say is that, for all z, however x is to z, so too will y be toz. The importance of this requirement will appearalong with the sortalist wayof meeting itwhen one confronts questions of splitting or fusion. Our claimwill be that nothing can count as a ground of identity unless it arises from aconception of a kind or sort of thing which x and y each exemplify and theconception confirms the unqualified or ceteris paribus presumable transitivity ofthe relation. See Section 10.

Consider next the permanence of identity. The identity of an object or a personis altogether unlike a hat or garment that one can take off or put on. In the literal

David Wiggins4


sense there is no such thing as somethings or someones getting a new identity.The one way in which a thing that persists cannot change, so long as it maintainsthe steady state of rapid flux that is essential to it, is in respect of being thechangeable thing, the cow, horse, human being . . . that it is. There are not tworelations among substances, namely simple identity and identity over time orthrough changeno more than there are varieties of sameness (unless meresimilarity is what is at issue). Identity over time or through change is the simpleor ordinary identity of things that last over time or through change. It is theidentity relation as restricted to things that change.

Consider next the absoluteness and determinacy of identity.9 This discouragesus from trying to make sense of objects or of identities that are vagueor indeterminate, but not from maintaining that we can have a to somedegree indeterminate or vague conception either of this or that object itself or ofthe sortal concept it falls underor of both.10 Section 16 ad fin returns to thismatter.

From the determinacy of identity we may advance further perhaps. Whereidentity is concerned, it seems impossible to make sense of almost or nearly.Why? Well, x is neither almost x nor almost not x. So, if y is x, then y is notalmost x or almost not x. That flows from indiscernibility. Given also theprinciple of permanence, one then arrives at the thought that y never was almostx or almost not x. Nor then can it have been a close run thing for y to have beenthe same thing as x. By contrast, consider growing tall enough to be a guards-man or strong enough to lift 50 kilograms. One can describe what more it wouldtake or would have taken to do that. Where identity is concerned, there is nodescribing anything like that.

If identity is all or nothing and leaves no room for nearly or almost, doesntthat rule out saying of someone that he just missed being the King of Swedenor was almost the first to discover oxygen? No. Once one thinks for a momentwhat is being said here, it is clear that in neither of these cases is there anybodywhom he is being said to be almost identical with. All that is being said is thathe came close to being crowned King of Sweden or almost discovered oxygenbefore anyone else discovered oxygen.

5.

So far we have been following through the necessary conditions of identity. Butwhat are the sufficient conditions?

Here philosophers often deploy a principle of Leibnizs, the Identity ofIndiscernibles:

If x and y have all their properties in common then x is y.

If we admit properties such as being the same person as Caesar or being thesame building as the Pantheon, this principle is undeniable. But we need asufficient condition which does not presuppose identity.



One could follow Leibniz a little more closely. Conceiving every individualas unique and claiming on the basis of his Principle of Sufficient Reasonthat there could never be two individuals indiscernible from one another,Leibniz believed that relations, including relations that appear to us as tem-poral and spatial, supervened or depended on the totality of the successivestates of the true substances of the world. In this spirit, one could interpretthe Identity of Indiscernibles in a way that excluded from among the pro-perties that it speaks of all properties that presuppose the prior determinationsof identity or difference. Maybe, as Leibniz supposed, every true substancereally is in fact unique.11 (Never mind the doubt whether his principle ofSufficient Reason required that.) But, even where every substance is unique,the identity of indiscernibles is still a questionable basis for a properly generaldefinition or explication of identity.12 It is worth noting, moreover, that inthe world as we know it one cannot exclude the possibility of an extendedobject that is perfectly symmetrical about all planes which bisect it. In theterms prescribed how is one to distinguish one half of the thing from its otherhalf?

6.

Let us put the monadic interpretation to one side and try another approach. Letus admit relational properties but purify them of all reference to particularobjects already identified. Now howeveras is well knownthe Identity ofIndiscernibles encounters another problem concerning symmetry. Considersquare 22 and square 43 on the chess board (Figure 1) that Strawson gives onpage 123 of his book Individuals (Strawson 1959).

Strawson writes Think of a chess board. The universe we are to consider isbounded by its edges. The universe consists therefore of a limited arrangementof black and white squares . . . Even if the view from each square is allowed to

Figure 1. Strawsons chessboard

David Wiggins6


comprehend the whole board, [it] is still impossible to differentiate square 43from square 22. The view from each over the whole board is the same: each hastwo white squares going away from it in one direction and five in the other . . .In other words, one who inhabits the universe Strawson describes and reliesupon the principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles will be bound to identify thedistinct squares 43 and 22.

At this point friends of the Identity of Indiscernibles13 will object that, evenif squares 22 and 43 cannot be separated by reference to properties provided forin Strawsons set-up, these squares are relatively discernible; 43 is to the leftof 22, for instance. Nor is it true, they will say, that whatever square directlyadjoins 22 directly adjoins 43. But where does such a defence leave us? It raisesquestions about what principles ought to govern such enquiries as this. Inconstructions or thought-experiments such as Strawsons, what can or cannot betaken for granted concerning the chessboard-dwellers grasp of left/right, andtheir capacity to keep track of objects whose discovery they mark by a demon-strative? More importantly, it reminds us of the difference between (A) aworkable sufficient condition which can be applied or appealed to by an enquirerwho is on the ground (so to speak) and in the presence of objects which at oncepersist and change; and (B) a Leibnizian condition of identity whose satisfactioncan appear or be verified only at the conclusion of explorations and laboursconducted on the basis of a workable sufficient condition based in some thoughtother than the Identity of Indiscerniblesa sufficient condition presupposedperhaps to the self-orientation of the observer in Strawsons chessboardexample.

7.

What makes me so sure that there must be some other thought? Well, we doarrive at judgements of identity. We do so almost effortlessly in many (but by nomeans all) ordinary cases. Yet imagine the process of trying to do so byenumerating all the properties of x and comparing them with all the propertiesof y. Without yet knowing any identities concerning xwithout knowingproperties of x other than those which are manifest at the moment of attemptingthe comparisonhow could one assemble all the properties of x itself in orderto check them against all the properties of y? There must be some other wayaway accessible in principle to someone who looks out at an object for the firsttime, keeps track of it and learns in due course to recognize it when comingupon it again. At this point the metaphysics of identity has no alternative but toreconstruct the thoughts that organize the epistemology of the relation and toreconstruct what thinkers actually do when they single out an object in expe-rience, at once observing the things behaviour, speculating what it does whenout of view and searching for the distinguishing marks (if any) by which this onemay be distinguished from other members of its kind and (however fallibly)reidentified as one and the same.



8.

According to the so-called sortalist conception of identity which I have tried overthe years to defend and propound, the question that organizes the efforts of onewho seeks to track an object continuously through the changes that it undergoesis this: What kind of a thing is this object before me? What is it? How does sucha thing behave? Moreover, at this point, having been driven hither by the searchfor a workable sufficient condition of identitydriven by nothing less than thelogic of the matterwe have no option but to attend to Aristotle. For the whatis it? question is Aristotles question. According to him, substantives such as man,apple tree, horse . . . not only determine the appearances of the things we singleout under these denominations but imply also a phusis or nature. The phusis ofa thing is its mode of being. It is the principle of activity of a kind whosemembers share and possess in themselves a distinctive source of developmentand change. Compare Metaphysics 1015a11, Physics 192b21.

The problem we had with a sufficient condition of identity was that we couldnot find any general condition. But the reason why we couldntor so it nowappearsis that there is no such unitary condition to discover. When we askwhether a is the same as b, we must be ready to ask what a is and what b is.Despite their divers analogies and structural resemblances, the phuseis of thingsare many and various.

Here I offer a small supplement to Aristotle. What guides our efforts to makesense of the world, to track things, and to reconstruct that which befalls themoutside our view, is a rough and ready but developing conception of what aman, an apple tree, a horse . . . is. Leibniz would say it is a clear indistinct idea,an applicable and practically effective conception of such a thing, but a concep-tion ready and waiting to be supplanted by what Leibniz would call a moredistinct idea of itan idea or conception that is better informed and moreanalytical or articulated.14 As we enquire into the nature of what confronts us, wesubsume it provisionally and tentatively under more and more specific concep-tions of the phusis which it instantiates, simultaneously inquiring into that phusisand correcting or refining our ideas about the phuseis of a host of other kinds thatwe encounter. (Compare Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, II, 19.) It is a naturalsuggestion that our aptitude for this kind of work is all of a piece with ourpractical capacity to apprehend the meanings of the substantives for thing-kindswhich we learn not from verbal definitions but from examples that we encounteror that are shown to us.

9.

Here let us expect an objection. There is simply no difficulty, it may be said, inkeeping a thing under continuous observation without making reference to anysort or kind. Indeed it simply has to be possible to do this. Otherwise we couldnever fix upon a thing in order to ask what is it?

David Wiggins8


To the second and more threatening of these two points I reply by empha-sizing Leibnizs distinction between clear (workable/operationally applicable)ideas or conceptions of a thing-kind and more distinct (more analytical andscientifically or otherwise spelled out) ideas or conceptions. In this connectionLeibniz might also point out that, if we did not bring to experience somethingnot itself of experience, we should be unable to make anything of experience.Innate within us there has to be not only an eagerness to look for continuitiesand a willingness to associate one presentation with some earlier presentation,but also a predisposition to search out certain particular kinds of thing. Nodoubt different animals have evolved to search out different kinds. But eve-rywhere the instinctual and pre-experiential idea which is implicit in ourstrivings and presides over them, has, I claim, to be an instinctual or innateconception or idea of an object or substance of some sort fmore precisely theconception: object or substance endowed with its principle of activity/functioning.15 Itis not the bare idea of an object or the idea of a bare object to which mightthen be superadded just any nature or way of being and behaving. That is notthe idea we work from. But suppose we did work from itrather than fromsome, however provisional, determination of the idea of an object or substanceof a sort endowed with its own discoverable principle of activity or function-ing. Then what judgements of identity or difference could be available to us,working either from that bare idea or from the idea of such a bare thing, whenwe witnessed the metamorphosis of the pupa into a chrysalis and the chrysalisinto the moth or butterfly? Or suppose we watch a warehouse fire in which abronze statue is reduced to a molten lump of metal. Everyone will agree thatthe statue is now a molten lump of metal. But what does it mean to say that?The continuity criterion requires that this verdict be taken to be a verdict ofidentity. But that reading is at fault.16 The notion of identity it invokes does notsubject itself to the requirements we have derived from the logic of the relation.Apply Leibnizs Law (the Indiscernibility of Identicals, not the Identity ofIndiscernibles). The lump of metal has survived the fire. The statue has notsurvived it. The statue was made by Rodin (say); this mass of metal was not.And now consider transitivity. In the subsequent adventures of the lump, whatelse will the bare continuity theorist be forced to say the statue is identicalwith? What else will he end up identifying the statue with? Bare continuitysupplies no principle, no rhyme or reason.17

10.

Until we reached the question of a sufficient condition, the logic of identityseemed simple and austere. The ragged and discursive character of everythingthat I have been claiming since we abandoned the Identity of Indiscernibleshas none of that simplicity or austerity. So it needs to be shown how thesortal conception of identity can satisfy the formal requirements we beganwith.



Let us begin here with the best case, namely where we have a natural kindwhose members, the gs, share in a phusis which brings with it an empiricallydiscoverable real principle of activity or nature which underlies, in ways thatPutnam and Kripke (and in his own way Leibniz) have each described, theuse of certain ordinary substantives or sortal predicates. (Not the use of allsubstantives, of course, but the use of the kinds of substantive that I ambeginning with.) Where the workings of such a nature serve to demarcate akind of organism with a settled single-track pattern of coming to be, matu-ration and passing away, and where that nature enters into the sortal conceptunder which we single out members of the kind,18 we are assured that thejudgements of same and other which we arrive at on the basis of our con-ception of that nature will determine a relation that shadows or recapitulatesthe way in which properties come to qualify particular organisms of this type.We have here everything we need to meet the Adequacy requirement whichwas explained in Section 4, Paragraph 3. We are assured, moreover, that thetransitivity of the relation we are invoking in making these judgements flowsfrom something inherent to the kind of thing we are concerned with.19 Thesejudgements order a sequence of states or phases that are made for one anotheras states or phases of a kind of thing that is possessed of a whole complexof dispositions and other properties which underlie its mode of behaviour oractivity.20

Consider now a case in which the formal properties of identity may seem tobe in jeopardy. Where twins will be born, the zygote divides. The logicalquestionsand, in the human case, the moral questionsthat flow from suchsplitting are addressed by thinking of the organism as starting upon its properexistence or life from a point after which division is embryologically impossible.In so far as this shaping of our idea of the life span of the creature is applied toall the organisms in question (not only to cases where the zygote does in factdivide), it fills out the idea of that kind of continuant or substance and enlargesour understanding of its moral and metaphysical import. Above all, it is the ideathus refined and delimited of such a substance that makes it possible to arriveat a ground of identity that meets the standard set by the Adequacy Require-ment.21 (See Section 4, Paragraph 3.)

11.

Where the nature of a thing is not nomologically grounded in the way justdescribedas also in cases which involve interference in the normal workings ofan objects principle of activityit is only to be expected that our theories ofidentity and individuation will encounter numerous difficulties. That willtrouble us soon enough. (See Sections 16 and 17 following.) First though I wantto review the defences of the conception which we have been taking for grantedof the world of changeable, enduring objects that are extended in space andpersist through time.

David Wiggins10


Parmenides, asking how something that is could possibly come to be fromwhat is not, gave logical arguments to show that that which truly isthe realrealitymust be changeless, imperishable, one, unique, boundless on all sides,motionless in the limits of mighty bonds, continuous and without spatial ortemporal differentiation. His argument was effectively disarmed when Aristotleshowed that the challenge Parmenides had set out could be divided and thenanswered piecemeal. But the question of change never goes away, it seems. Themost recent challenge comes from a new picture and a new argument. If we areto understand change, it is urged, we must replace our everyday or endurantistconception of substances by a less familiar so-called perdurantistor, as I mightprefer to say, stroboscopicconception. The things we take to be enduring (it isargued) are really successions of changeless, distinct and instantaneous temporalparts.

12.

David Lewis writes:

Sometimes you sit and then you are bent; sometimes you stand or lie,and then you are straight. How can one and the same thing have twocontrary intrinsic properties? How does it help to say [as the enduran-tists say] that it has them at different times? (Lewis 2002: 441)

Lewiss explanation of intrinsic may be given as follows:

We distinguish intrinsic properties, which things have in virtue the waythey themselves are, from extrinsic properties, which they have in virtueof their relations or lack of relations to other things. (Lewis 1986: 61)

Lewis is right to insist that being straight and being bent are not extrinsicproperties. For these are not relational properties. But does the fact that I was (att1) sitting and was later (at t2) standing really render such properties relational?22

If I am seated now, today, in front of a wooden table, does the involvementof the wooden table, the time and the place make my being seated into arelational state? How can they do that? In so far as there is a relation here, Iprotest, it surely holds between (1) the non-relational and faultlessly intrinsicstate of my having sat down or being seated, the state itself resulting from theaction/event that initiated the state; and (2) the scene (at that table/thattime/that place) where that action or event of sitting down took place.

For formal purposes there may be a reason to represent David was seated attable t during the period p . . . by R(d,t,p . . .). But this notation was neverdesigned to reveal the full nature of the verb/predicate R or the plurality anddiversity of everything that might be supplied to further argument places withinthe brackets.23 We learn nothing from the notation about the serious idea ofrelation that David Lewis needs to call in evidence if he seeks to insist upon theintrinsic character of being bent, straight . . . sitting, standing. . . .



13.

A word now about the conclusion itself that Lewis draws from his account ofintrinsic properties. Is it not a strange business to transfer onto a noun thetemporal indication that seems to qualify a verb? It is one thing for a physicistto seek to displace the world-view of substances and their alterationsand todisplace it entirelyby an altogether different one, as in the spirit of ErnstMachss assertion:

bodies are bundles of reactions connected by law . . . that which isconstant is always the connection of reactions according to law and thisalone. This is the critically purified concept of substance which scien-tifically ought to replace the vulgar one.24

It is another thing to seek to correct the more inclusive world-view at whichphilosophy seeks to arrive and to replace ordinary objects by successions ofthing-momentsthis-horse-at-t, that-river-at-t, or David-Lewis-at-t. At one andthe same time, how can we deny ordinary substances their status as propercontinuants, insist that ordinary substances are really constructs, yet leanshamelessly upon our ordinary understanding of substances when we come tospecify that from which these constructs are to be seen as constructed orassembled? (Within a straightforward advocacy of Machs proposal one wouldnot even attempt such a thing. One has left all that behind.) Are thing-moments such as this-horse-at-t to be introduced or explained not in a waythat presupposes horses and times but directly and simply by definitioncreative definitionor by simple postulation?25 Even as one considers that sortof question, moreover, one must ask one more: could one bestow upon anobject so defineddurationless as it has to be (given the argument on whichthe whole construction depends)26all the properties of shape, disposition andattitude upon which the perdurantist aspired to found the intrinsic propertiesof sitting, standing . . . bent, straight . . . and the like on which the originalargument depended?

14.

It is not an option for philosophy to reject the four dimensional conception of theworld urged upon us by some philosophers and metaphysicians of science. Butin accepting it one is not committed to see things, people and organisms inperdurantist fashion as made up of instantaneous temporal parts. Instead, let usthink of a three dimensional substance in the ordinary endurantist way, thenthink of the space-time region the substance occupies, then take a thing-momentas an instantaneous cross-section of that region.27 On these terms, one arrives atthe four-dimensional view by beginning from an endurantist conception of asubstance, without having to cut off a branch that one is sitting on or resortingto creative definition. Proceeding thus, one can advance philosophically

David Wiggins12


unimpeded to the metaphysical relation of substances to their four-dimensionalcounterpart.

We distinguish effortlessly between Socrates and the succession of eventsthat makes up Socrates life history. Can we not make a philosophical distinctionthen between Socrates himself and a succession of thing-moments in four-dimensional space-time? At any moment in Socrates life we can answer thequestion which person Socrates is. But, we cannot say which space-time regionSocrates is identical with until Socrates has departed this life and the series ofevents in space-time that make up his life is complete. We can say of Socratesthat he could have adopted a different defence at his trial at Athens in 399 BC.But of a completed series of events or thing-moments in space-time we canhardly say that that very series might have comprised different occurrences. (Aset-theoretical object such as a succession has its members necessarily.) We canof course say that, in the place of this or that succession or series of events inspace-time, a different one might have existed, comprising perhaps a similarinitial section. But it wont be enough to say that sort of thing if we want to takeit fully seriously that the real Socrates might have mounted a different defence.To speak simply of a different succession of events from the actual events ofSocrates life including an alternative defence does not make room for Socrateshimself to mount an alternative defenceunless of course we are ready todistinguish between the person Socrates and a succession of events. Moregenerally, consider predication. Can one predicate of a succession of events, asone can of a person, the properties weak, cowardly, capable, resolute, oppor-tunistic, erratic, honest, a fair-weather friend, or (the Emperor Galbas specialattribute) capax imperii nisi imperasset?28

Should such thoughts and attributions as these be dispensed with altogetherthen? Or should we seek for some compromise that hunts down four-dimensional surrogates for these properties? Better still, I think we should holdon to the proper recipients of such attributions, and rest content with the factthat the enduring substances we normally think and speak of register perfectlysatisfactorily within the four-dimensional continuum (see again Carnap, asquoted in note 27). It is true that the three-dimensional things that have thesehistories are not singled out under concepts that have application in space-timephysics or cosmology. But that will not exempt the things themselves from thelaws of nature that govern the material world.

15.

To the philosophical four-dimensionalist who likes to think of substances aspossessing temporal parts as well as spatial parts, the category differences justdwelt upon may appear pedantic and inconsiderable. But they point towardssomething of profound interest to us, namely the constraints upon any concep-tion of body or substance which can be open to an organism or person that acts,deliberates, or enquires. A conscious being cannot think of itselfor of the



persons, organisms or physical objects that it encountersas having the shapeof a complete succession of events and present only in part at the moment ofaction or deliberation. Nor can it think of itself as an event or an event in themaking. To act and think as it does, a conscious being must think of its wholeself as present at the moment of reflection, perception or action and poised topersist in that way in the future. It must think of itself at t as extending in spacewherever its parts are at t. It must conceive its past as consisting not of its parts(in the sense in which it is spatially extended by its parts at t) but of the earlierphases or stages of the life of the whole being which it itself is.29

To hold out for the category differentiation that underlies these contentions is(in the pejorative sense) anti-scientistic, if you will. But it is in no way at oddswith the scientific world-view itself. Indeed it vindicates modes of descriptionthat are natural, habitual and seemingly indispensable to almost all branches ofscience itself.30

16.

Back now to identity and change. Suppose that we try to apply the ideas set outin Section 9 not to the individuation of natural substances but to the individu-ation of artefacts. Taking artefacts as things organized in such a way as tosubserve some designated purpose or purposes, one might say that, just as anatural thing has a principle of activity, so an artefact has its mode of operationor functioning. But how close or illuminating is that parallelism?

Following the narrative of Plutarchs Life of Theseus, consider Theseus shipas preserved through the centuries by the Athenians for its annual voyage fromPiraeus to the shrine of Apollo on the island of Delos. Suppose, in the spirit ofThomas Hobbes use of the example (see S&SR: 923), that even as the ship wasrefitted year by year with new planks or spars, a long line of cunning fathers andsons or daughters salvaged everything that was replaced and cast aside. Supposethat, in the end, some descendant of theirs found that he had collected every-thing he neededor almost everything (and enough, it might be said)toreassemble Theseus original ship. Suppose he claimed that he now ownedTheseus original ship. He might issue the announcement: Never mind theconstantly renewed ship plying its annual course to Delos. If you want to see thereal thing, come and see the ship itself. Admission 10 drachmae.

In the cases where we had the phusis of a natural thing following its owncourse, such problems were excluded. For an artefact, however, there is no normor law of development to exclude such happenings. Nor can we delegate thewhole matter to a scientist who can delve deeper into the principle of activity fora ship or for that sort of ship. There is no such principle. The question at issuerelates rather to the purposes of those whose artefact it ispurposes they mayperhaps modify, reconsider, revise or refine as time passes.

On one reading of those purposes, Theseus ship must be the ship that isconstantly renewed. But if one says that, one must stare down the reconstructed

David Wiggins14


ship. One must seek to discredit it. There is something doctrinaire about that. Onanother reading of those purposes, it may be said that we should balance atechnical interest that users have in the purpose that is served by an artefact withthe concern they have with the histories of things. Looking for a compromisethey might attempt between those interests, its sailors might trace the shipthrough its usage over the years, yet rule at the same time that there is a limitto how far the process of renewal and material replacement can be carriedalimit which in the case that Hobbes imagined is exceeded. But then (alas) allsorts of disquieting or annoying further questions will appear.31

Rather than search further for a resolution or explore more subtle concep-tions of a ship, let us advance to something more general and more important.It is this. If genuine identity is to be the thing at issue here, then (1) thedialectic of same and other within which all these questions are to be resolvedmust cohere with the account of what a ship (or a trireme or whatever) is; and(2) the said account of what the thing in question is must furnish a basis foradjudications of same and other which will be answerable in their collectivity tothe formal requirements we began with in Section 2and to the requirementsof coherence among the ratiocinations that support the said adjudications.(Compare the requirements in a legal context upon the accumulated findingsof equity/epieikeia.) Only where verdicts and grounds are answerable to thisstandard will there be a secure framework for the determination of genuineidentity.

When one undertakes to debate seriously a question such as that of Theseusship, the question under debate is not then the relatively uninteresting questionwhich ship shall receive the title or sobriquet Ship of Theseus, but the questionof how to conceive the ship itself. When we reach that question, however, I thinkit would be wise for philosophy not to hold itself aloof from the thoughts anduses of those who ship it is. Typically, they will decide such a matter not onceand for all but incrementally and in a way that the theorist needs to understandbefore he ventures to criticize. What happens at the beginnings of the ship castsa long shadow forwards upon matters still to be decided. Yet subsequent eventsand uses may retrospectively modify conceptions of what such a ship is andcomplicate or enrich the dialectic within which questions of same and other haveto be decided.

It will be pointed out that, if one says what I have just said, then it will notbe completely or fully determinate what exactly it was that Theseus built, sailedin and sent on an annual pilgrimage to Delos. And to that extent, it will becomplained, indefinitely many questions of identity may remain indeterminate.Doesnt this conflict with the principle of the absoluteness and determinatenessof identity given in Section 6?

I reply that there is no conflict. A line by line inspection of the argument givenin Section 6 reveals that what is proved there is that there is no such identityas indeterminate identity. The proof as given does not however excludethe possibility of its being epistemically indeterminate whether x was or wasntthe same as y. For the proof depended on the transparency (non-obliquity) of the



context . . . is determinately x. The proof leaves unaffected and to one side allnon-transparent uses of determinately or definitely.

There is another mistake to avoid here. If it is incompletely determinate at agiven point in the lifetime of the ship what exactly Theseus ship was, that doesnot imply that Theseus ship itself was something vague or indeterminate. Tothink that would be nothing less than a confusion of sense and reference.Moreover, one who refers to the ship may know perfectly well which ship he hasin mind despite his having an incomplete or only partially determinate concep-tion of the sortal concept ship. From epistemic indeterminacy with respect to what(kind of thing) one should not simply conclude that there is epistemic indeter-minacy with respect to which (thing). (Related questions, concerning Tib, Tibblesand the rest, are pursued at S&SR: 1736.)

17.

So much for the case where the thing-kindthe what a given object or substanceisis not nomologically grounded. After artefacts and the problems theypresent, let us revert to the kinds where there is a nomologically well-groundedprinciple of activity of a natural thing, but consider now the case where there isradical interference in the normal workings or output of that principle. Inphilosophy as it now is, the most conspicuous case is that of the person.32

Let us begin with the usual example in its original presentation, prescindingfrom endless variations and further complications that have been proposedthecase that is where Brown and Robinson each undergo an operation whichinvolves the removal of the brain from the skull. Through a surgical blunderBrowns brain is placed in Robinsons skull. The resulting person, whom SydneyShoemaker, the inventor of this example, calls Brownson (see Shoemaker 1963),has Browns brain and Robinsons body; and his psychological states includingmemories, are those that one would expect Brown to have. Is Brownson thenBrown?

The question created some excitement inside philosophy and even outside. Itprompted the thought that all that counts in matters having to do with theidentity of persons is psychological continuity, a relation which some claimedhowever implausibly to disentangle from all involvement with identity. Othersreached for their response along other routes. Here is the sortalist approach.Brown is a person. How are we to think of a person? As an ego or self? As a selfamong a multitude of other selves? In the absence of anything more, that is notso much false as a useless starting point. (Self is not, on its own, a sortal orindividuative concept. At best it is simply a determinable whose more specificdeterminations may be properly individuative.) What else can be said? Well, inpractice, in our everyday thoughts, our paradigm for a person is a human being,an embodied substance, a creature with a certain bodily conformation, a creaturethat interprets other human creatures and is wide open to be interpreted bythem. A person is not just any sentient or conscious being. A person is one of

David Wiggins16


us.33 As such a substance grows up, lives and matures, the principle of activityof the substance becomes progressively more complex and its modes of agency,cognition and feeling, its powers and capacities, its fund of information, expe-rience and memory all become more copious and more and more specific.

On these terms, shall one say that Brownson and Brown are the same humanbeing? Have the events that Shoemaker describes resulted in Brownsons par-ticipating in Browns very own principle of activity and holding on to Brownsvery own life? The question needs to be considered under at least two mainaspects, aspects which we will consider in this order: the aspect of cognitionand awareness and the neurological-cum-characterological-cum-physiognomicaspect.

18.

Prominent within Browns store of information, experience, expectation andintention, some of it highly particular, is his experiential memory. Let memorybe hostage for all the rest. Suppose that Brown, when he was 13 years old andplaying in a parent-pupil cricket match on a school speech day, bowled out hisfather. Brown said he would never forget doing this. But what about Brownson?Well, Brownson says that he bowled out Brown Senior. But does Brownson reallyremember doing so? The only reason why he says he remembers is that he hasbeen given Browns brain. Mustnt we still ask whether Brownson was there atthe cricket match? Was it Brownson himself, when he was 13, who bowled outBrown Senior on that occasion?

In reply to that question, some will respond by saying: Never mind identity.Concentrate rather upon psychological continuity, where that embraces identitybut does not definitionally require it. But this is an unfortunate or mistakenresponse. I say this for three reasons.

First, in so far as the proposed relation of psychological continuity is notanswerable to the Adequacy requirement, in so far as psychological continuitydoes not create even a presumption against the splitting of a (so-called)stream of consciousness among multiple Brownsons, and in so far as it is notspecified whether Brownson has the whole of Browns brain or only one half,34

Brownson may have no clear title to be anything more than a propagule ora layered offshoot of Brown. In so far as we use psychological continuity asa surrogate for identity and no more is claimed than psychological continuity,we must be prepared to think of Brown not so much as a substance as a kindof substance, as the clone (-type) to which a potential plurality of Brownsbelong, or as a universal instantiated in different consciousnesses. We beganwith the question of identity, but now there has been a radical change ofsubjectin both senses of the word subject. Brown must span metaphysicalcategories.

The second point is connected with the first and no less important. Once wereconceive direct memory to the point where we cease to require of such



memory that the rememberer should have him/herself been present at theevent supposedly directly remembered, we remove direct memory itselffrom a role that is integral of our understanding of it. Within the fabric ofhuman knowledge, not everything can depend on testimony. At some pointssomewhere, there have to be eye-witnesses possessed of direct or experientialmemory. Without experiential memory as normally conceived, the ideaof witness must go to waste (and with it received ideas of empirical knowledge).Understood in the received way, experiential memory can vouch for theclaim that an event occurred and was thus and so. It can undergo cross-examination. The subject who remembers is in a position to try to placea remembered event within the whole course of his or her life and takeresponsibility for his or her account of what happened, what s/he saw orheard and how that was. Once memory is torn from the whole web of ideaswhere it belongs, however, shall we know even what we mean by remember?Can one really scrub out a key part of the meaning and expect all the rest tostand?35 And how then shall we understand the creation and accumulation ofknowledge?

Thirdly, so far as Shoemakers version of Brown and Brownson is concerned,it is entirely unnecessary to modify the idea of experiential memory. If we staywith the question as originally posed and if our way with it is to seek todetermine whether Brownson participates in Browns principle of activity orinherits Browns very own life, the thing we have to be sure of is whetherBrownson can recall some sufficiency of the other details concerning the cricketmatch, place it as an event in the narrative of a single life which is Browns,report the event in the manner of a participant and so on. Once we know allthat (and are satisfied mutatis mutandis with regard to other aspects of aware-ness), it will be time to pass to the neurological-cum-characterological-cum-physiognomical aspect of things.

Brownsons body is Robinsons body. But the character, mien, and typicalresponses of Brown depended in part on his physiognomyon his wholebodily physiognomy (if I may stretch the meaning of the word so). Thefunctioning of a human being, the capacity to express oneself in act, gestureand attitude, all depend on a mutual accord or co-adaptation, at once personaland lifelong, between the brain and the rest of the nervous system. (This isnot on any sane understanding a mere contingency.) Not only that. Thesethings depend also upon a settled co-adaptation, achieved over the passing oftime and constantly adjusted, between the nervous system and the limbssomething again personal and lifelong. How could Brown-in-Brownson enjoyall of that? Nor must one omit to mention specifically the face. Brownson hasthe wrong face (as well as the wrong voice). It is true that a person we knowmay be wounded or disabled or paralysed or disfigured, even given a newface (or voice). This may represent a terrible subtraction from a going concern,but human life can allow for it. The trouble for Brownson is that his conditiondoes not represent a stage in any going concern from which we can allow forsubtraction.

David Wiggins18


19.

At this juncture, departing suddenly from our appointed mode of enquiry indissatisfaction with it, one finds oneself thinking as follows: if I were Brownthen, if I had survived all these adventures, I should surely know that I hadsurvived and should be able to say Despite whatever has been happening to me,I still exist. There is still such a person as Brown. I am Brown. Enlarging on thatthought, there is a temptation to insist that it is not for a philosophical theoristto say whether Brown can or cannot make it through the procedures thatShoemaker described. It is for the subject, namely Brown himself.

This cant be wrong so far as it goes. But let us try taking the subjects wordfor it. One question will still trouble us. When we hear the words . . . I amBrown, who is doing the speaking? Is it Brown-in-Brownson, that is Brownhimself, or is it some new creature Brownson? A correct use of the word I mayraise more questions than it settles. Suppose the words issue from an atom-for-atom, property-for-property copy of Brown which was produced some timebefore Brown entered hospital. Suppose the copy says I am Brown. But,whatever the copy is or isnt, this isnt Brown himself we are faced with. Again,how tempting even is it to think that a subject we suddenly confront cannotmake a mistake about who or what he is? IF subjects really can be made, copiedor reconstructed, can they not be programmed to believe falsehoods about whothey are or where they come from?

From this foray into the subjects side of things, a sortalist must conclude, Ibelieve, that we were right to think that most of our difficulties have arisen fromour uncertainty about the full nature and limits of personhood; that the only wayforward is to develop and refine our conception of what a person is. In themultitude of ordinary cases, we shall know a person perfectly well for a personwhen we see one. In a large number of cases we shall know perfectly well whichperson he or she is. At the level of reference persons are not indefinite objects ofreference or individuation. It is at the level of sense and idea that we findindeterminacy, the indeterminacy of our conception of what more precisely aperson isan indeterminacy we can only diminish by reflection and the explo-ration of our ideas of embodiment, of human presence, of agency, responsibility,solidarity, cognition . . . , but are unlikely ever to diminish to nothing. (Mutatismutandis, compare Sections 1617.)

20.

It would be a mistake to suppose that it takes examples as extreme as Shoe-makers to bring home to us the uncertainty and incompleteness of our concep-tions of what a person is. Let us remind ourselves of scenes which are entirelyunspectacular. Suppose that in real life a woman in a very advanced state ofdementia, already completely at sea in the old peoples home to which she hasbeen sent, catches pneumonia and is taken to the district hospital. Suppose that,



when she gets there, it is the now habitual scene (no less familiar to the worldof US medicine, I am told, than it is to tracts of the world of public medicine inEurope) of neglect and abject confusion. Suppose that she scarcely knows anylonger who she is or where she has come from. She loses, it might be said, allsense of self. (Does she still have a self? Advocates of the self to determine.)There is one residue. Her body still identifies her. Contrast Brown and Brownson.If the old woman is lucky enough, then her daughter-in-law can still find her andtry very hard for a short span (the length of a visit) to restore her to herself.Even if that doesnt happen, there is still that possibility. The old woman has thepotentiality perhaps to be restored to something of herself, or so we suppose.But, when we think of that possibility, how exactly do we have to conceive ofa person in relation to the body that marks their presence? I am not sure. Again,I say, our conception of the human person is incomplete.

In discussion of Brown and Brownson it is often assumed that, if there werelater mental events that were downwind from Brown before brain surgery, thenthe person Brownor some person Brownmust have persisted somehow. Buthow strongly can a well-founded conception of person support that assumption?Again I am unsure.

21.

In response to considerations such as figure in Sections 1720, when I urgedthem upon him, Shoemaker proposed recently that the argument for countingBrowns life as continuing in Brownson is best made for the special case whereBrown and Robinson, despite their difference of name, are identical twins.36

What a diminution of all the larger claims which have been made! But nevermind. For the thing that matters much more than the Brown-Brownson questionis the larger problem it illustrates, not for the first time. We have described italready. Where there is a claim of identity, what does it involve for the answerto match the question? There has to be more to the finding of identity betweenx and y than the discovery that y has moved smoothly into the place of x as theclosest continuer for x, the best successor to x, the proper inheritor of x, or theperpetuator of the same clone- or person-type as x. The object y must arrivewhere x was in a way that manifests the unfolding of a nature inhering in a thingwith the history of an individual substanceor else in a way which somehowconverges upon that. On the sortalist view, it is that thought or some adaptationof that thought which must shape the whole dialectic within which we must tryto decide questions of same and other.

22.

The sortalist theory of identity and individuation may appear wide open to theaccusation of anthropocentrism. But there is nothing anthropocentric about

David Wiggins20


insisting that the judgement of same or other should have a content andbe answerable by virtue of that content to the logic of identity. There isnothing anthropocentric about insisting that, as we learn more and think more,we should always be ready, at the level of sense, to adjust our ideas orconceptions of the thing-kinds under which organisms, other natural things,artefacts . . . are singled out. Only through fallacy (I have claimed) can thepartiality, incompleteness or indeterminacy of our conceptions be transmittedfrom the level of sense to the level of reference, either to substances themselvesor to their kinds.

It is of course a sort of anthropocentrism for us to focus our attention sointently upon the kinds of kind (ships etc.) that impinge on human life andhuman awareness. But (except in so far as it may be claimed that there issomething special about scientific instruments and the like) such a focus does notamount to a claim of cosmic importance.

Sortalism is not a theory about the ultimate constituents of the universe. Butlike any other would-be respectable piece of philosophy, it leaves room for theidea of a completed theory of ultimate constituents. Such a theory would surelydispense altogether with continuants, their kinds and their qualities. (Radicaldevelopments of that sort are prefigured in the citation from Mach in Section 13.)Why though should those who will propound the completed theory want todeny the existence of the levels or categories of being that the ultimate constitu-ents of reality subvene/sustain/make possible?

The sortalism I have defended sees itself as one component of a more generaltheory of identity and individuation, a theory embracing all sorts of othercategories of being beside substancecategories of event, process, state, dispo-sition, field, and heaven knows what else. Such a general account will of courseconfront questions and difficulties which I have not attempted or foreseen,concerning what it will take to assign their proper logical content to claims ofidentity that lie outside the category of substance.37

David WigginsNew CollegeOxford OX1 3BNUK

NOTES

1 Some of the acts included in this list, like others I might adjoin, go beyond thedictionary definition of individuate. No matter. The word does no distinctive philo-sophical work here beyond suggesting some of the questions to be pursued and answersto be proposed.

2 It can of course be copied, but that is different. See further Section 15; also Wiggins1995.

3 Compare fragment 125 which adjoins another illustrative instance and puts one inmind of the last portion of our first extract from Schoenheimer: The barley drink



disintegrates and loses its nature unless it is constantly stirred. Texts for this and othercitations are given as B12, B91, B125 in Diels and Kranz 1952.

On the interpretation of Heraclitus, see Wiggins 1982.4 Cf. Quine 1972: 490. Here Quine interprets F by specifying the intended replace-

ments for this letter. He also explains the reason why this formal version is preferableto the informal version in terms of properties to which I often resort in the text.

In the displayed version given in the text, the is is intended timelessly. It may helpagainst misunderstandings that prompt doubts concerning identities among things thatchange through time to spell out the Indiscernibility Principle as follows:

If x is identical with y (simply identical, whether timelessly or not) then, if andonly if x is, was or will be F, y is, was or will be F.

5 In answer to questions that may be raised about the possibility of a referentialopacity created by necessarily, see S&SR: 115 ff.

6 See S&SR: 18892.7 In S&SR, Chapter 3, Section 4, I tried to extend this near-truism into a principle D(x),

the much controverted Only a and b rule. In replacing that rule by the Adequacy principlegiven in the next paragraph, I hope to confirm in another way certain results I sought toachieve through that rule.

8 Note that the grounds need not consist of a proposition. Still less will finding anidentity always be a matter of deduction.

9 Timothy Williamson, afforcing earlier work of Prior and Kripke, has shown how, bythe addition of one further logical principle beyond those we have started with here, wecan vindicate the necessity and complete determinacy of difference as well as that ofidentity. See Williamson 1996.

10 For the Lockean term sortal and its continuing usefulness, see Strawson 1959, PartTwo.

Anticipating the claims of the next paragraph let me say that I adjourn for another dayquestions that will arise about compound quasi-sortal concepts such as heap of coal, bar ofsoap, lump of clay, and the tolerance of the indeterminate particulars that fall under themof diminution, replacement, exchange of their constituents vel sim. See S&S: 2056; S&SR:94, 3740.

11 For Leibnizs doctrine here, see S&SR: 62.12 I note that this point is fully available to Leibniz himselfas is the claim I should

make that identity is a primitive and indefinable notion. See New Essays on HumanUnderstanding, Book I, Chapter 3 (Leibniz 1704: 102): The ideas of being, possible and sameare so thoroughly innate that they enter into all our thoughts and reasoning, and I regardthem as essential to our mind.

How well does the claim of indefinability cohere with the claim some peoplemake (but I know of no statement of Lebinizs where he says this) that identitysupervenes on other qualities and relations? For the doubtful plausibility or sense of theclaim, see Wiggins 2002. See also Section 22 below.

13 See, for instance Hawthorne 2006: 811; also Quine 1960: 2301.14 Cf. S&SR: 805 and Wiggins 20078: Section 8. Do not be surprised that Leibniz

should appear on both sides of this argument. That is the prerogative of genius fused witha mind open to everything.

15 That is to say that implicit in these instinctual strivings is the inarticulate grasp ofa formal concept. Such a formal concept is a determinable whose determinations are moreand more specific kinds of thing.

David Wiggins22


16 The true meaning must be that the statue was made up from the material whichis now a molten lump. See S&SR: 3943, revising similar passages in ISTC.

17 Compare Leibniz (Gerhardt 187590: II, 170): La continuit toute seule ne constituepas la substance non plus que la multitude ou le nombre la constitue . . . Il faut quelquechose qui soit numerot ou rpt ou continu.

18 This is to say that that nature enters into any conception or idea of the sortalconcept that is good enough to enable one who has that conception to single out membersof the extension of the concept. See Wiggins 1993 and 20078. In my neo-Fregean usage,the concept lies at the level of reference (Bedeutung) and the conception or idea lies at thelevel of sense. Among conceptions of a concept some are conceptions of a sortal conceptand thus conceptions (inter alia) of how a thing has to be and what it has to be in orderto belong to the extension of the concept.

19 This assurance is not to be confused with an assurance against all error in theidentification of things with that nature, or against other misconceptions of that natureitself. There is never such an assurance.

20 Compare the passage from Leibnizs preface to New Essays, quoted at S&SR: 84.21 It may be asked why, in the cases where no division takes place, we shouldnt

identify the zygote with the embryoeven as we shall identify the embryo with thefoetus and the foetus with the baby. Answer: it flows from the logic of identity to demandthat any true ground of identity should meet the Adequacy requirement, a requirementwhich is only the corollary of the Indiscerniblity Principle. The only source we shall everhave for a ground that will be in that way adequate is one that arises from the kind ofthings in question. But if that is so, then we must take care to subsume the organismwithin a sort or kind whose proper specification underwrites the presumption oftransitivity. Contrast with that the choice of a putative kind whose specification has theorganism begin as a zygoteor as an egg, or gamete, why not?while allowing thatsome zygotes do and some zygotes do not end up as single whole embryos. The objectionto thinking of the organism as belonging to such a sort is that a specification of it and itsmembers, in the shapes of gamete, zygote, embryo, foetus . . . , creates no satisfactorypresumption of transitivity. It makes no room for any properly Adequate ground ofidentity for members of the sort. At worst, the presumption of transitivity needs to betractably defeasible. This is to say that where the presumption fails, this needs to havebeen predictable and explicable by reference to considerations provided for in a correctaccount of the sort of thing. See further Sections 16 and 17.

22 See Rundle 2009: 848.23 Concerning the complexity of that which lurks below the surface appearance of

such modes of combination, see the writings of Donald Davidson and James Higgin-botham. See, for instance, Higginbotham 1998. For collateral considerations and argu-ments, see Wiggins 19856.

24 See Torretti 1999: 237.25 For the power of creative definitionas of postulationto create paradox or

perplexity, see S&SR: 1736, a discussion inter alia of Geachs Tib/Tibbles example; seealso Suppes 1957: chap 8.

26 Compare Rundle 2009.27 In effect Carnap does just that, simply and faultlessly, in Carnap 1958: 1578: A

thing occupies a definite region of space at a definite instant of time, and a temporal seriesof spatial regions during the whole history of its existence. I.e. a thing occupies a regionin the four dimensional space-time continuum. A given thing at a given instant of timeis so to speak a cross-section of the whole space-time region occupied by the thing. It is



called a slice of the thing or a thing-moment. We conceive a thing as the temporal seriesof its slices. The entire space-time region occupied by the thing is a class of particularspace-time points which we speak of as the space-time points of the thing.

28 Compare S&S: 1689.29 It is neither necessary nor sensible to try to set out these points in terms of a generic

notion subsuming both an objects existence at a time or its persisting through time andits occupation of space or space-time. See Fine 2006: esp. 7001.

30 Think what damage would result from expunging the distinction between substanceand process/narrative/event from most ordinary scientific exposition. Indeed consider inthat connection all the descriptions that figure in the citation given in Section 2.

31 For instance, if they are prepared in due course to find Theseus ship in the dockwhere it is being reconstructed, can they avoid assigning a discontinuous spatio-temporalpath to the ship? (A further development of a problem posed by the disassemblage ofartefacts. Cf. S&SR: 99102.) For what happened at the point in time when some minorrenewal or replacement, the last ruled permissible, disqualified the ship in the water frombeing Theseus ship?

32 Unless the most conspicuous case is still that of an earthworm which can be cut inhalf and be succeeded by two perfectly viable earthworms. Or so one is told. Subject tothere being no scientific facts favouring one half over the other, the case appearsanalogousso far as the logic of identity is concernedto that of the amoeba, on whichsee S&SR: 723, 834.

33 An indexicality not lightly to be dispensed with. Cf. S&SR: 198 and Wiggins 1996:2448.

34 See ISTC, Part Four.35 Cp. S&SR: 21819. There is one account of experiential memoryof quasi-memory

so-calledwhich lacks this defect. That is to say that it does not attempt an impossiblesubtraction from the given meaning of remember (a meaning held in place not by adefinition but by a whole pattern of thinking and speaking), but seeks to definequasi-memory from scratch. See Parfit 1984: 221. For criticisms of that definition, seeS&SR: 21330. Perhaps the most important of these criticisms is that what Parfit offers isa definition of accurately-quasi-remember which it is impossible to turn into a definitionof quasi-remember.

36 See Shoemaker 2004: 5732 and 61013, especially 61213.37 For comments received on the occasion of the lecture in Amsterdam drawn from

this text I am indebted to the Editor and the Editorial Committee of the European Journalof Philosophy. I am indebted to Timothy Williamson both for that which I have appliedfrom Williamson 1995 and for the specific comments that he gave me on the penultimatedraft of the whole paper. I am also indebted to a conversation I had with Michael Martinat the time of writing the lecture.

REFERENCES

Carnap, R. (1958), Introduction to Symbolic Logic and its Applications. New York City: Dover.Diels, H. and Kranz, W. (1952), Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker. Berlin: Weidermann.Fine, K. (2006), In Defence of Three-Dimensionalism, Journal of Philosophy, 103: 699714.Gerhardt, C. I. (ed) (187590), Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibniz, 7 vols. Berlin:

Weidmann.Hawthorne, J. (2006), Metaphysical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

David Wiggins24


Higginbotham, J. (1998), Adverbs, in E. Craig (ed), Routledge Encyclopaedia of Philosophy.London and New York.

Kirk, G. (1954), Heraclitus: The Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge: Cambridge University Pess.Leibniz, G. W. (1704), Nouveau essays sur lentendement humain, in Samtliche Schriften und

Briefe, Series VI, Vol. 6. Berlin: Akademie Verlag Press 1923.Lewis, D. (1986), The Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell. (2002), Tensing the Copula, Mind, 111: 114.Parfit, D. (1984), Reasons and Persons. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Quine, W. V. (1960), Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. (1972), Review of Milton K. Munitz (ed), Identity and Individuation, Journal of

Philosophy, 69: 48897.Rundle, B. (2009), Time, Space and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Schoenheimer, R. (1942), The Dynamic State of Body Constituents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press.Shoemaker, S. (1963), Self and Self Knowledge. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. (2004), Brown-Brownson Revisited, The Monist, 87: 57193 and 61013.Strawson, P. F. (1959), Individuals. London: Methuen.Suppes, P. (1957), Introduction to Logic. Princeton: Van Nostrand.Torretti, R. (1999), The Philosophy of Physics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Wiggins, D. (1967), ISTC = Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. Oxford, Blackwell. (1980), S&S = Sameness and Substance. Oxford, Blackwell. (1982), Heraclitus Conceptions of Flux, Fire and Material Persistence, in M.

Nussbaum and M. Schofield (eds), Language and Logos: Essays for G. E. L. Owen.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 112.

(19856), Verbs, Adverbs and some other Modes of Grammatical Combination,Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 86: 273306.

(1993), Putnams Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Freges Doctrine of Sense,Reference and Extension: Can They Cohere? in A. W. Moore (ed), Meaning andReference. Oxford: Oxford University Press: 192207.

(1995), Substance, in A. C. Grayling (ed.) Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject.Oxford: Oxford University Press: 21449.

(1996), Reply to Paul Snowdon, in S. Lovibond and S. G. Williams (eds), Essays forDavid Wiggins: Identity, Truth and Value, Oxford: Blackwell: 2448.

(2001), S&SR = Sameness and Substance Renewed. Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress.

(2002), Identity and Supervenience in A. Bottani, M. Carrara, P. Giaretta (eds),Individuals, Essence and Identity. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers: 24766.

(20078), Three Moments in the Theory of Definition or Analysis: Its Possibility, ItsAim or Aims, and Its Limit or Terminus, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 108:73109.

Williamson, T. (1995), Vagueness. London: Routledge. (1996), The Necessity and Determinacy of Distinctness, in S. Lovibond and S. G.

Williams (eds), Essays for David Wiggins: Identity, Truth and Value, Oxford: Blackwell:117.



Wiggins, Identity, Individuation and Substance

Documents

Transcript of Wiggins, Identity, Individuation and Substance