Full Idea
To account for change, stages and temporal parts must be as fine-grained as change: a material thing must have as many stages or parts as it is in incompatible states during its lifetime.
Gist of Idea
Stages must be as fine-grained in length as change itself, so any change is a new stage
Source
Katherine Hawley (How Things Persist [2001], 2.4)
Book Reference
Hawley,Katherine: 'How Things Persist' [OUP 2004], p.48
A Reaction
There seems to be a dilemma for stages here, of being so fat that they are divisible and change, or so thin that they barely exist. Lose-lose, I'd say.
Related Idea
Idea 16205 The stages of Stage Theory seem too thin to populate the world, or to be referred to [Hawley]