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Full Idea
Animals roaming jungles on some planet at the other end of the galaxy with the tiger-look and the tiger genetic make-up but with a disjoint evolutionary history are not the same species as the earthly tigers.
Gist of Idea
Alien 'tigers' can't be tigers if they are not related to our tigers
Source
Joseph Almog (Nature Without Essence [2010], 10)
Book Ref
-: 'Journal of Philosophy' [-], p.368
A Reaction
I disagree. If two independent cultures build boats, they are both boats. If we manufacture a tiger which can breed with other tigers, we've made a tiger. His 'tigers' would scream for explanation, precisely because they are tigers. If not, no puzzle.
Related Idea
Idea 17873 Water must be related to water, just as tigers must be related to tigers [Almog]
| 17864 | Defining an essence comes no where near giving a thing's nature [Almog] |
| 17863 | Essences promise to reveal reality, but actually drive us away from it [Almog] |
| 17866 | Essential definition aims at existence conditions and structural truths [Almog] |
| 17867 | If a concept is not compact, it will not be presentable to finite minds [Almog] |
| 17868 | Surface accounts aren't exhaustive as they always allow unintended twin cases [Almog] |
| 17869 | Kripke and Putnam offer an intermediary between real and nominal essences [Almog] |
| 17871 | Fregean meanings are analogous to conceptual essence, defining a kind [Almog] |
| 17872 | Definitionalists rely on snapshot-concepts, instead of on the real processes [Almog] |
| 17873 | Water must be related to water, just as tigers must be related to tigers [Almog] |
| 17870 | Alien 'tigers' can't be tigers if they are not related to our tigers [Almog] |
| 17876 | Individual essences are just cobbled together classificatory predicates [Almog] |
| 17877 | The number series is primitive, not the result of some set theoretic axioms [Almog] |