8 ideas
| 12154 | Are 'word token' and 'word type' different sorts of countable objects, or two ways of counting? [Geach, by Perry] |
| Full Idea: If we list the words 'bull', 'bull' and 'cow', it is often said that there are three 'word tokens' but only two 'word types', but Geach says there are not two kinds of object to be counted, but two different ways of counting the same object. | |
| From: report of Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by John Perry - The Same F II | |
| A reaction: Insofar as the notion that a 'word type' is an 'object', my sympathies are entirely with Geach, to my surprise. Geach's point is that 'bull' and 'bull' are the same meaning, but different actual words. Identity is relative to a concept. |
| 8969 | We should abandon absolute identity, confining it to within some category [Geach, by Hawthorne] |
| Full Idea: Geach argued that the notion of absolute identity should be abandoned. ..We can only grasp the meaning of a count noun when we associate it with a criterion of identity, expressed by a particular relative identity sortal. | |
| From: report of Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by John Hawthorne - Identity | |
| A reaction: In other words, identity needs categorisation. Hawthorne concludes that Geach is wrong. Geach clearly has much common usage on his side. 'What's that?' usually invites a categorisation. Sameness of objects seems to need a 'respect'. |
| 16075 | Denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory [Wasserman on Geach] |
| Full Idea: Geach's denial of absolute identity has drastic implications for logic, semantics and set theory. He must deny the axiom of extensionality in set theory, for example. | |
| From: comment on Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by Ryan Wasserman - Material Constitution 6 | |
| A reaction: I'm beginning to think we have two entirely different concepts here - the logicians' and mathematicians' notion of when two things are identical, and the ordinary language concept of two things being 'the same'. 'We like the same music'. |
| 12152 | Identity is relative. One must not say things are 'the same', but 'the same A as' [Geach] |
| Full Idea: Identity is relative. When one says 'x is identical with y' this is an incomplete expression. It is short for 'x is the same A as y', where 'A' represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance. | |
| From: Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980], p.39), quoted by John Perry - The Same F I | |
| A reaction: Perry notes that Geach's view is in conscious opposition to Frege, who had a pure notion of identity. We say 'they are the same insofar as they are animals', but not 'they are the same animal'. Perfect identity involves all possible A's. |
| 16073 | Leibniz's Law is incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate [Geach, by Wasserman] |
| Full Idea: Geach rejects the standard formulation of Leibniz's Law as incomplete, since it includes a non-relativized identity predicate. | |
| From: report of Peter Geach (Reference and Generality (3rd ed) [1980]) by Ryan Wasserman - Material Constitution 6 | |
| A reaction: Not many people accept Geach's premiss that identity is a relative matter. I agree with Wiggins on this, that identity is an absolute (and possibly indefinable). The problem with the Law is what you mean by a 'property'. |
| 2957 | Brain bisection suggests unity of mind isn't all-or-nothing [Nagel, by Lockwood] |
| Full Idea: Nagel argues (because of brain bisection experiments) that we should jettison our commonsense assumption that the unity of consciousness is an all-or-nothing affair. | |
| From: report of Thomas Nagel (Brain Bisection and Unity of Consciousness [1971]) by Michael Lockwood - Mind, Brain and the Quantum p.84 | |
| A reaction: It seems wrong to call it 'commonsense'. It is an assumption that precedes any judgement, but if you rapidly grasp that your mind is in your brain, it becomes common sense that you can cut lumps out of your mind. |
| 3285 | We may be unable to abandon personal identity, even when split-brains have undermined it [Nagel] |
| Full Idea: As a result of the evidence of split-brains, it is possible that the ordinary, simple idea of a single person will come to seem quaint some day, …but we may be unable to abandon the idea, no matter what we discover. | |
| From: Thomas Nagel (Brain Bisection and Unity of Consciousness [1971], p.164) | |
| A reaction: I'm not sure what grounds you can have for a claim that we can't abandon our current view of selves, even when the new reality will be utterly different. Rather conservative? I would expect future concepts to roughly match future reality. |
| 20959 | Concepts are only analytic once the predicate is absorbed into the subject [Schleiermacher] |
| Full Idea: The difference between analytic and synthetic judgements is an unimportant fluid one. 'Ice melts' is analytic if it is already taken up into the concept of ice, and synthetic if not yet taken up. It is just a different state of the formation of concepts. | |
| From: Friedrich Schleiermacher (Dialektik [1833], p.563), quoted by Andrew Bowie - Introduction to German Philosophy 8 'Scientific' | |
| A reaction: [compressed] I wonder if Quine ever encountered this quotation. The idea refers to Kant's notion of analyticity, and makes the good point that predicates only become 'contained in the subject' once the situation is very familiar. |