Combining Texts

Ideas for 'Topics', 'Idea for a Universal History' and 'Sameness and Substance'

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28 ideas

9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 5. Individuation / a. Individuation
Individuation needs accounts of identity, of change, and of singling out [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: A theory of individuation must comprise at least three things: an elucidation of the primitive concept of identity or sameness; what it is to be a substance that persists through change; and what it is for a thinker to single out the same substance.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 1)
     A reaction: [compressed] Metaphysics seems to need a theory of identity, but I am not yet convinced that it also needs a theory of 'individuation'. Never mind, press on and create one, and see how it looks. Aristotle wanted to explain predication too.
Individuation can only be understood by the relation between things and thinkers [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Understanding the concepts involved in individuation can only be characterised by reference to observable commerce between things singled out and thinkers who think or find their way around the world precisely by singling them out.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 1)
     A reaction: I take individuation to be relatively uninteresting, because I understand identity independently of how we single things out, but Wiggins's reliance on sortals implies that the very identity of things in the world is knee deep in mental activity.
9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 5. Individuation / c. Individuation by location
Singling out extends back and forward in time [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: The singling out of a substance at a time reaches backwards and forwards to time before and after that time.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 2)
     A reaction: Presumably this is an inferred history and persistence conditions. Sounds fine in a stable world. We assume (a priori?) that any object will have a space-time line for its duration.
9. Objects / A. Existence of Objects / 5. Individuation / e. Individuation by kind
Genus gives the essence better than the differentiae do [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: In assigning the essence [ti estin], it is more appropriate to state the genus than the differentiae; for he who describes 'man' as an 'animal' indicates his essence better than he who describes him as 'pedestrian'.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 128a24)
     A reaction: See Idea 12279. This idea is only part of the story. My reading of this is simply that assigning a genus gives more information. We learn more about him when we say he is a man than when we say he is Socrates.
The only singling out is singling out 'as' something [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: There could be no singling out tout court unless there could be singling out 'as'.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 2)
     A reaction: I find this claim baffling. Do animals categorise everything they engage with? Are we unable to engage with something if we have not yet categorised it? Surely picking it out is prior to saying that sort of thing it is?
In Aristotle's sense, saying x falls under f is to say what x is [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: To say that x falls under f - or that x is an f - is to say what x is (in the sense Aristotle isolated).
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.1)
     A reaction: This is a key claim in Wiggins's main principle. I'm not convinced. He wants one main sortal to do all the work. I don't think Aristotle at all intended the 'nature' of an individual thing to be given by a single sortal under which it falls.
Every determinate thing falls under a sortal, which fixes its persistence [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: We can expect that, for every completely determinate continuant, there will be at least one sortal concept that it falls under and that determines a principle of persistence for it.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.4)
     A reaction: I think he has the 'determines' relation the wrong way round! Being a tiger doesn't determine anything about persistence. It is having that nature and those persistence conditions which make it a tiger. And why does he optimistically 'expect' this?
9. Objects / C. Structure of Objects / 8. Parts of Objects / c. Wholes from parts
In the case of a house the parts can exist without the whole, so parts are not the whole [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: In the case of a house, where the process of compounding the parts is obvious, though the parts exist, there is no reason why the whole should not be non-existent, and so the parts are not the same as the whole.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 150a19)
     A reaction: Compare buying a piece of furniture, and being surprised to discover, when it is delivered, that it is self-assembly. This idea is a simple refutation of the claims of classical mereology, that wholes are just some parts. Aristotle uses modal claims.
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 3. Individual Essences
Everything that is has one single essence [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: Everything that is has one single essence [en esti to einai].
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 141a36)
     A reaction: Does this include vague objects, and abstract 'objects'? Sceptics might ask what grounds this claim. Does Dr Jeckyll have two essences?
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 5. Essence as Kind
Natural kinds are well suited to be the sortals which fix substances [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Among the best candidates to play the roles of sortal and substantial predicates are the natural kind words.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.1)
     A reaction: There is always a danger of circularity with this kind of approach. How do we distinguish the genuine natural kinds from the dubious ones?
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 7. Essence and Necessity / b. Essence not necessities
An 'idion' belongs uniquely to a thing, but is not part of its essence [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: A property [idion] is something which does not show the essence of a thing but belongs to it alone. ...No one calls anything a property which can possibly belong to something else.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 102a18)
     A reaction: [See Charlotte Witt 106 on this] 'Property' is clearly a bad translation for such an individual item. Witt uses 'proprium', which is a necessary but nonessential property of something. Necessity is NOT the hallmark of essence. See Idea 12266.
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 11. Essence of Artefacts
Artefacts are individuated by some matter having a certain function [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Ordinary artefacts are individuated, rather indeterminately and arbitrarily, by reference to a parcel of matter so organised as to subserve a certain function.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.3)
9. Objects / D. Essence of Objects / 13. Nominal Essence
Nominal essences don't fix membership, ignore evolution, and aren't contextual [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Nominal essences are unsatisfactory because they fail either of necessity or of sufficiency for membership of the intended kind, they leave unexplained how sortals can evolve, and there is no room for culture or context in our reference to kinds.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.1)
     A reaction: [a compression of a paragraph] I would have thought that Locke would just say it is tough luck if nominal essences can't do all these things, because that's just the way it is, folks.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 1. Objects over Time
'What is it?' gives the kind, nature, persistence conditions and identity over time of a thing [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: The question 'what is it?' refers to the persistence and lifespan of an entity, and so manifests the identity over time of an entity and its persistence, between persistence and existence, and between its existence and being the kind of thing it is.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.1)
     A reaction: The idea that establishing the kind of a thing can do all this work strikes me as false. The lifespan of a 'human' can be between five minutes and a hundred years. Humans have a clear death, but thunderstorms don't.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 7. Intermittent Objects
A restored church is the same 'church', but not the same 'building' or 'brickwork' [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: We can say of Hume's church that the present church is the same 'church' as the old parish church but not the same 'building' or the same 'stonework' as the old parish church.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.5)
     A reaction: Unconvinced. This seems to make a 'church' into an abstraction, which might even exist in the absence of any building. And it seems to identify a building with its stonework. Wiggins yearns for a neat solution, but it ain't here.
A thing begins only once; for a clock, it is when its making is first completed [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: A thing starts existing only once; and in the case of a clock its proper beginning was at about the time when its maker finished it.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.3)
     A reaction: I love the example that challenges this. Take the clock's parts and use them to make other clocks, then collect them up and reassemble the first clock. If the first clock has persisted through this, you have too many clocks. Wiggins spots some of this.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 9. Ship of Theseus
Priests prefer the working ship; antiquarians prefer the reconstruction [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Dispute might break out between priests who favoured the working ship and antiquarians who preferred the reconstruction.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 3.3)
     A reaction: This captures the contextual nature of the dispute very succinctly. Wiggins, of course, thinks that sortals will settle the matter. Fat chance.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 11. End of an Object
Destruction is dissolution of essence [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: Destruction is a dissolution of essence.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 153b30)
     A reaction: [plucked from context!] I can't think of a better way to define destruction, in order to distinguish it from damage. A vase is destroyed when its essential function cannot be recovered.
9. Objects / E. Objects over Time / 12. Origin as Essential
If two things are the same, they must have the same source and origin [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: When things are absolutely the same, their coming-into-being and destruction are also the same and so are the agents of their production and destruction.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 152a02)
     A reaction: Thus Queen Elizabeth II has to be the result of that particular birth, and from those particular parents, as Kripke says? The inverse may not be true. Do twins have a single origin? Things that fission and then re-fuse differently? etc
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 2. Defining Identity
Identity cannot be defined, because definitions are identities [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Since any definition is an identity, identity itself cannot be defined.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.2 n7)
     A reaction: This sounds too good to be true! I can't think of an objection, so, okay, identity cannot possibly be defined. We can give synonyms for it, I suppose. [Wrong, says Rumfitt! Definitions can also be equivalences!]
Leibniz's Law (not transitivity, symmetry, reflexivity) marks what is peculiar to identity [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: The principle of Leibniz's Law marks off what is peculiar to identity and differentiates it in a way in which transitivity, symmetry and reflexivity (all shared by 'exact similarity, 'equality in pay', etc.) do not.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 1.2)
Identity is primitive [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: Identity is a primitive notion.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.1)
     A reaction: To be a true primitive it would have to be univocal, but it seems to me that 'identity' comes in degrees. The primitive concept is the minimal end of the degrees, but there are also more substantial notions of identity.
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 6. Identity between Objects
A is necessarily A, so if B is A, then B is also necessarily A [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: The famous proof of Barcan Marcus about necessity of identity comes down to simply this: Hesperus is necessarily Hesperus, so if Phosphorus is Hesperus, Phosphorus is necessarily Hesperus.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 4.3)
     A reaction: Since the identity of Hesperus and Phosphorus was an a posteriori discovery, this was taken to be the inception of the idea that there are a posteriori necessities. The conclusion seems obvious. One thing is necessarily one thing.
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 7. Indiscernible Objects
By the principle of Indiscernibility, a symmetrical object could only be half of itself! [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: The full Identity of Indiscernibles excludes the existence in this world of a symmetrical object, which is reduced to half of itself by the principle. If symmetrical about all planes that bisect it, it is precluded altogether from existence.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], 2.2)
     A reaction: A really nice objection. Do the parts even need to be symmetrical? My eyeballs can't be identical to one another, presumably. Electrons already gave the principle big trouble.
9. Objects / F. Identity among Objects / 9. Sameness
'Same' is mainly for names or definitions, but also for propria, and for accidents [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: 'The same' is employed in several senses: its principal sense is for same name or same definition; a second sense occurs when sameness is applied to a property [idiu]; a third sense is applied to an accident.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 103a24-33)
     A reaction: [compressed] 'Property' is better translated as 'proprium' - a property unique to a particular thing, but not essential - see Idea 12262. Things are made up of essence, propria and accidents, and three ways of being 'the same' are the result.
Two identical things have the same accidents, they are the same; if the accidents differ, they're different [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: If two things are the same then any accident of one must also be an accident of the other, and, if one of them is an accident of something else, so must the other be also. For, if there is any discrepancy on these points, obviously they are not the same.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 152a36)
     A reaction: So what is always called 'Leibniz's Law' should actually be 'Aristotle's Law'! I can't see anything missing from the Aristotle version, but then, since most people think it is pretty obvious, you would expect the great stater of the obvious to get it.
Numerical sameness and generic sameness are not the same [Aristotle]
     Full Idea: Things which are the same specifically or generically are not necessarily the same or cannot possibly be the same numerically.
     From: Aristotle (Topics [c.331 BCE], 152b32)
     A reaction: See also Idea 12266. This looks to me to be a pretty precise anticipation of Peirce's type/token distinction, but without the terminology. It is reassuring that Aristotle spotted it, as that makes it more likely to be a genuine distinction.
We want to explain sameness as coincidence of substance, not as anything qualitative [Wiggins]
     Full Idea: The notion of sameness or identity that we are to elucidate is not that of any degree of qualitative similarity but of coincidence as a substance - a notion as primitive as predication.
     From: David Wiggins (Sameness and Substance [1980], Pre 2)
     A reaction: This question invites an approach to identity through our descriptions of it, rather than to the thing itself. There is no problem in ontology of two substances being 'the same', because they are just one substance.