Why sense cannot be made of vague identity
Noûs 42 (1):1–16 (2008)
| Abstract | In this paper I present a new argument against vague identity — one that is more fundamental than existing arguments — and I also try to explain why we find the idea of vague identity puzzling, in a way that will dispel the puzzlement. In brief, my argument is this: to make clear sense of something, one must at least model it set-theoretically; but due to the special place of identity in set-theoretic models, any vague relation that one does model set-theoretically will not be identity, for real identity will already be there, built into the background of the model, and perfectly precise. | |||||||||
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