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Full Idea
Leibniz's Law (the indiscernibility of identicals) appears to be crucial to our understanding of identity, and, more particularly, to our understanding of distinctness.
Gist of Idea
Indiscernibility is basic to our understanding of identity and distinctness
Source
Harold Noonan (Identity [2009], §2)
Book Ref
'Stanford Online Encyclopaedia of Philosophy', ed/tr. Stanford University [plato.stanford.edu], p.2
A Reaction
True, but indiscernibility concerns the epistemology, and identity concerns the ontology.
| 16015 | Problems about identity can't even be formulated without the concept of identity [Noonan] |
| 16014 | It is controversial whether only 'numerical identity' allows two things to be counted as one [Noonan] |
| 16017 | Identity is usually defined as the equivalence relation satisfying Leibniz's Law [Noonan] |
| 16016 | Identity definitions (such as self-identity, or the smallest equivalence relation) are usually circular [Noonan] |
| 16020 | Identity can only be characterised in a second-order language [Noonan] |
| 16018 | Indiscernibility is basic to our understanding of identity and distinctness [Noonan] |
| 16019 | Leibniz's Law must be kept separate from the substitutivity principle [Noonan] |
| 16024 | I could have died at five, but the summation of my adult stages could not [Noonan] |
| 16023 | Stage theorists accept four-dimensionalism, but call each stage a whole object [Noonan] |