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Full Idea
When a man swears to the same tree having stood for fifty years in the same place, he means ...not that the tree has been all that time the same in the strict philosophical sense of the word. ...In a loose and popular sense they are said to be the same.
Gist of Idea
A tree remains the same in the popular sense, but not in the strict philosophical sense
Source
Joseph Butler (Analogy of Religion [1736], App.1)
Book Ref
'Personal Identity', ed/tr. Perry,John [University of California 1975], p.100
A Reaction
A helpful distinction which we should hang on. Of course, by the standards of modern physics, nothing is strictly the same from one Planck time to the next. All is flux. So we either drop the word 'same' (for objects) or relax a bit.
Related Idea
| 12266 | 'Same' is mainly for names or definitions, but also for propria, and for accidents [Aristotle] |
| 12287 | Two identical things have the same accidents, they are the same; if the accidents differ, they're different [Aristotle] |
| 12288 | Numerical sameness and generic sameness are not the same [Aristotle] |
| 8650 | Things are the same if one can be substituted for the other without loss of truth [Leibniz] |
| 21315 | A tree remains the same in the popular sense, but not in the strict philosophical sense [Butler] |
| 15826 | There is 'loose' identity between things if their properties, or truths about them, might differ [Chisholm] |
| 11910 | Being 'the same' is meaningless, unless we specify 'the same X' [Geach] |
| 16999 | A vague identity may seem intransitive, and we might want to talk of 'counterparts' [Kripke] |
| 16494 | We want to explain sameness as coincidence of substance, not as anything qualitative [Wiggins] |