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10279 | Can we discover whether a deck is fifty-two cards, or a person is time-slices or molecules? [Shapiro] |
Full Idea: Can we 'discover' whether a deck is really identical with its fifty-two cards, or whether a person is identical with her corresponding time-slices, molecules, or space-time points? This is like Benacerraf's problem about numbers. | |
From: Stewart Shapiro (Philosophy of Mathematics [1997]) | |
A reaction: Shapiro is defending the structuralist view, that each of these is a model of an agreed reality, so we cannot choose a right model if they all satisfy the necessary criteria. |