23 ideas
| 14064 | If a statue is identical with the clay of which it is made, that identity is contingent [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Under certain conditions a clay statue is identical with the piece of clay of which it is made, and if this is so then the identity is contingent. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], Intro) | |
| A reaction: This initiated the modern debate about statues, and it is an attack on Kripke's claim that if two things are identical, then they are necessarily identical. Kripke seems right about Hesperus and Phosphorus, but not about the statue. |
| 14066 | A 'piece' of clay begins when its parts stick together, separately from other clay [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: A 'piece' of clay is a portion of clay which comes into existence when all of its parts come to be stuck to each other, and cease to be stuck to any clay which is not a part of the portion. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: The sort of gormlessly elementary things that philosophers find themselves having to say, but this is a good basic assertion for a discussion of statue and clay, and I can't think of an objection to it. |
| 14067 | Clay and statue are two objects, which can be named and reasoned about [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The piece of clay and the statue are 'objects' - that is to say, they can be designated with proper names, and the logic we ordinarily use will still apply. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: An interesting indication of the way that 'object' is used in modern analytic philosophy, which may not be the way that it is used in ordinary English. The number 'seven', for example, seems to be an object by this criterion. |
| 14069 | We can only investigate the identity once we have designated it as 'statue' or as 'clay' [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: To ask meaningfully what that thing would be, we must designate it either as a statue or as a piece of clay. What that thing would be, apart from the way it is designated, is a question without meaning. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: He obviously has a powerful point, but to suggest that we can only investigate a mysterious object once we have designated it as something sounds daft. It would ruin the fun of archaeology. |
| 14076 | Essentialism is the existence of a definite answer as to whether an entity fulfils a condition [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for a class of entities is that for one entity and a condition which it fulfills, the question of whether it necessarily fulfills the condition has a definite answer apart from the way the entity is specified. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: Yet another definition of essentialism, but resting, as usual in modern discussions, entirely on the notion of necessity. Kit Fine's challenge is that if you investigate the source of the necessity, it turns out to be an essence. |
| 8443 | Mereological essentialism says an entity must have exactly those parts [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: Mereological essentialism says that nothing else could have been the unique entity composed of certain parts except the very thing that is composed of those parts. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (Varieties of Causation [1980], 2) | |
| A reaction: This sounds initially implausible. It means the ship of Theseus ceases to be that ship if you change a single nail of it. Whether we say that seems optional, but if we do, it leads to the collaps of all our normal understanding of identity. |
| 14077 | Essentialism for concreta is false, since they can come apart under two concepts [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Essentialism for the class of concrete things is false, since a statue necessarily fulfils a condition as 'Goliath', but only contingently fulfils it as 'lumpl'. On the other hand, essentialism for the class of individual concepts can be true. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: This rests on his definition of essentialism in Idea 14076. He rests his essentialism about concepts on an account given by Carnap ('Meaning and Necessity' §41). The essence of a statue and the essence of a lump of clay do seem distinct. |
| 14070 | A particular statue has sortal persistence conditions, so its origin defines it [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: A proper name like 'Goliath' denotes a thing in the actual world, and invokes a sortal with certain persistence criteria. Hence its origin makes a statue the statue that it is, and if statues in different worlds have the same beginning, they are the same. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: Too neat. There are vague, ambiguous and duplicated origins. Persistence criteria can shift during the existence of a thing (like a club which changes its own constitution). In replicated statues, what is the status of the mould? |
| 14073 | Claims on contingent identity seem to violate Leibniz's Law [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The most prominent objection to contingent identity (as in the case of the statue and its clay) is that it violates Leibniz's Law. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], V) | |
| A reaction: Depends what you mean by a property. The trickiest one would be that the statue has (right now) a disposition to be worth a lot, but the clay doesn't. But I don't think that is really a property of the statue. Properties are a muddle. |
| 14065 | Two identical things must share properties - including creation and destruction times [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: For two things to be strictly identical, they must have all properties in common. That means, among other things, that they must start to exist at the same time and cease to exist at the same time. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], I) | |
| A reaction: I don't accept that coming into existence at time t is a 'property' of a thing. Coincident objects give you the notion of 'existing as' something, which complicates the whole story. |
| 14074 | Leibniz's Law isn't just about substitutivity, because it must involve properties and relations [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: As a general law of substitutivity of identicals, Leibniz's Law is false. It is a law about properties and relations, that if two things are identical, they have the same properties and relations. It only works in contexts which attribute those. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], V) | |
| A reaction: I'm not convinced about relations, which are not intrinsic properties. Under different descriptions, the relations to human minds might differ. |
| 14072 | Possible worlds identity needs a sortal [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: Identity across possible worlds makes sense only with respect to a sortal | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], IV) | |
| A reaction: See Gibbard's other ideas from this paper. I fear that the sortal invoked is too uncertain and slippery to do any useful job, and I can't see any principled difficulty with naming something before you can think of a sortal for it. |
| 14078 | Only concepts, not individuals, can be the same across possible worlds [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: It is meaningless to talk of the same concrete thing in different possible worlds, ...but it makes sense to speak of the same individual concept, which is just a function which assigns to each possible world in a set an individual in that world. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], VII) | |
| A reaction: A lovely bold response to the problem of transworld identity, but one which needs investigation. It sounds very promising to me. 'Aristotle' is a cocept, not a name. There is no separate category of 'names'. Wow. (Attach dispositions to concepts?). |
| 14079 | Kripke's semantics needs lots of intuitions about which properties are essential [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: To use Kripke's semantics, one needs extensive intuitions that certain properties are essential and others accidental. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], X) | |
| A reaction: As usual, we could substitute the word 'necessary' for 'essential' without changing his meaning. If we are always referring to 'our' Hubert Humphrey is speculations about him, then nearly all of his properties will be necessary ones. |
| 7658 | Obviously there can't be a functional anaylsis of qualia if they are defined by intrinsic properties [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: If you define qualia as intrinsic properties of experiences considered in isolation from all their causes and effects, logically independent of all dispositional properties, then they are logically guaranteed to elude all broad functional analysis. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.8) | |
| A reaction: This is a good point - it seems daft to reify qualia and imagine them dangling in mid-air with all their vibrant qualities - but that is a long way from saying there is nothing more to qualia than functional roles. Functions must be exlained too. |
| 7655 | The work done by the 'homunculus in the theatre' must be spread amongst non-conscious agencies [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: All the work done by the imagined homunculus in the Cartesian Theater must be distributed among various lesser agencies in the brain, none of which is conscious. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: Dennett's account crucially depends on consciousness being much more fragmentary than most philosophers claim it to be. It is actually full of joints, which can come apart. He may be right. |
| 7657 | Intelligent agents are composed of nested homunculi, of decreasing intelligence, ending in machines [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: As long as your homunculi are more stupid and ignorant than the intelligent agent they compose, the nesting of homunculi within homunculi can be finite, bottoming out, eventually, with agents so unimpressive they can be replaced by machines. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.6) | |
| A reaction: [Dennett first proposed this in 'Brainstorms' 1978]. This view was developed well by Lycan. I rate it as one of the most illuminating ideas in the modern philosophy of mind. All complex systems (like aeroplanes) have this structure. |
| 7656 | I don't deny consciousness; it just isn't what people think it is [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: I don't maintain, of course, that human consciousness does not exist; I maintain that it is not what people often think it is. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.3) | |
| A reaction: I consider Dennett to be as near as you can get to an eliminativist, but he is not stupid. As far as I can see, the modern philosopher's bogey-man, the true total eliminativist, simply doesn't exist. Eliminativists usually deny propositional attitudes. |
| 7654 | What matters about neuro-science is the discovery of the functional role of the chemistry [Dennett] |
| Full Idea: Neuro-science matters because - and only because - we have discovered that the many different neuromodulators and other chemical messengers that diffuse throughout the brain have functional roles that make important differences. | |
| From: Daniel C. Dennett (Sweet Dreams [2005], Ch.1) | |
| A reaction: I agree with Dennett that this is the true ground for pessimism about spectacular breakthroughs in artificial intelligence, rather than abstract concerns about irreducible features of the mind like 'qualia' and 'rationality'. |
| 14071 | Naming a thing in the actual world also invokes some persistence criteria [Gibbard] |
| Full Idea: The reference of a name in the actual world is fixed partly by invoking a set of persistence criteria which determine what thing it names. | |
| From: Allan Gibbard (Contingent Identity [1975], III) | |
| A reaction: This is offered as a modification to Kripke, to deal with the statue and clay. I fear that the 'persistence criteria' may be too vague, and too subject to possible change after the origin, to do the job required. |
| 8442 | What law would explain causation in the case of causing a table to come into existence? [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: If I fasten a board onto a tree stump, causing a table to come into existence, ...what law of nature or, even, what quasi-law or law-like principle could possibly play in such a case of generation the role required by nomological accounts? | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (Varieties of Causation [1980], 1) | |
| A reaction: A very nice question. The nomological account is at its strongest when rocks fall off walls or magnets attract, but all sorts of other caused events seem too messy or complex or original to fit the story. |
| 8444 | Where is the necessary causation in the three people being tall making everybody tall? [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: It is not clear how to analyse the form of necessary causation found in the only three people in the room being tall causing everybody in the room to be tall. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (Varieties of Causation [1980], 5) | |
| A reaction: I would want to challenge this as a case of causation. There are no events or processes involved. It seems that a situation described in one way can also be described in another. |
| 8445 | The necessitated is not always a result or consequence of the necessitator [Sosa] |
| Full Idea: The necessitated is not always a result or consequence of the necessitator. If p-and-q is a fact, then this necessitates that p, but the fact that p need not be a result or consequence of the fact that p-and-q. | |
| From: Ernest Sosa (Varieties of Causation [1980], p.242) | |
| A reaction: This is obviously correct, and needs to be borne in mind when considering necessary causation. It is not enough to produce a piece of logic; something in the link from cause to effect must be demonstrated to be necessary. |