In theorizing about racial pejoratives, an initially attractive view is that pejoratives have the same reference as their “neutral counterparts”. Call this the identity thesis. According to this thesis, the terms “kike” and “Jew”, for instance, pick out the same set of people. To be a Jew just is to be a kike, and so to make claims about Jews just is to make claims about kikes. In this way, the two words are synonymous, and so make (...) the same contribution to the truth-conditions of sentences containing them. While the fundamental claim for the identity thesis that Jews are kikes sounds anti-semitic, it need not be actually anti-semitic. The identity thesis is usually bolstered with the further claim that the pejorative aspect of “kike” and other such terms is located elsewhere than in truth-conditional content, so what makes “kike” a bad word is a non-truth-conditional association with anti-semitism that is not shared with the word “Jew”. The exact nature and location of the negative moral content of pejoratives is a matter of some dispute among identity theorists. But whatever the intuitive appeal of the identity theory for those persuaded by such views, it is nevertheless inconsistent. (shrink)

In this paper, the arguments against the mind-body identity thesis from the author’s [1994] paper, “Mental Properties,” are presented but in significantly more detail. It is shown that, because of scientific essentialism, two currently popular arguments against the identity thesis -- the multiple-realizability argument and the Nagel-Jackson knowledge argument -- are unsatisfactory as they stand and that their problems are incurable. It is then shown that a refutation of the identity thesis in its full (...) generality can be achieved by weaving together two traditional Cartesian arguments -- the modal argument and the certainty argument. This argument establishes, not just the falsity of the identity thesis, but also the metaphysical possibility of disembodiment. The paper ends with a discussion of the nature of the relation between the mind and the body. (shrink)

This paper begins with a discussion of the logical apparatus of Frege, where his use of Sinn suggests a modification of Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles. Then, it turns to Strawson's basic particulars with its essentially Kantian orientation. This brings forward the logical ground upon which the Identity Thesis rests. Finally, following Frege with some modifications, the paper suggests that an ontological list where concepts can be treated as objective (materially dependent) subsistent entities would be (...) necessary in order to avoid errors of J. J. C. Smart and other analytic philosophers who hold the Identity Thesis. (shrink)

In the first twelve chapters of this book, I am concerned with the Fregean notion of an object (the reference of a proper name) and its connection with the notion of identity. The rest of the book is devoted to a discussion of the problem of personal identity.

A defense of panpyschism based on Ockham's Razor, arguing against the materialistic identity thesis, e.g., J J C Smart.

Peter Kivy investigates the unity of form and content in the arts, particularly in poetry. While Kivy says much with which I happily agree, I sadly disagree with him about the impossibility of form–content identities. Kivy's arguments fail to compel: there are other ways of understanding form–content identities and the need for them that has been felt by artists and critics. CiteULike Connotea Del.icio.us What's this?

"Pain" need not be a rigid designator, but instead may pick out a state by its causal role. If it is a rigid designator, then the apparent contingency of identity comes from imagining something else filling the causal role.

E. J. Lowe argues that the mental event token cannot be identical to the complex neural event token for they have different counterfactual properties. If the mental event had not occurred, the behavior would not have ensued, while if the neural event had not occurred, the behavior would have ensued albeit slightly differently. Lowe's argument for the neural counterfactual relies on standard possible world semantics, whose evaluation of such counterfactuals is problematic. His argument for the mental counterfactual relies on a (...) premise that is plausibly false. My arguments support other counterfactuals, which are consistent with identity theories. (shrink)

I consider whether there is a plausible conception of personal identity that can accommodate the ‘Multiplicity Thesis’ (MT), the thesis that some ways of creating and deploying multiple distinct online personae can bring about the existence of multiple persons where before there was only one. I argue that an influential Kantian line of thought, according to which a person is a unified locus of rational agency, is well placed to accommodate the thesis. I set out such (...) a line of thought as developed by Carol Rovane, and consider the conditions that would have to be in place for the possibility identified by MT to be realised. Finally I briefly consider the prospects for MT according to neo-Lockean and animalist views of personhood. (shrink)

I argue that physicians can save women from life-threatening pregnancies by performing a craniotomy, placentectomy, or salpingotomy without intending death or harm. To support this conclusion, I defend the relevance thesis about intentions (a person intends X only if X explains the action). I then criticize the identity thesis (if a person intends X and knows X is Y then the person intends Y) and three mistakenly strict moral principles: (1) one may not intend something that is (...) a serious harm for an innocent person, (2) one may not intend to terminate pregnancy before viability, which would prohibit, and (3) one may not act on a person’s body in a harmful way in order to benefit another person. (1) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors, (2) would prohibit treating hepatic pregnancies and other ectopic pregnancies, and (3) would prohibit procuring organs from living donors and performing many prenatal surgeries. (shrink)

Hegel’s thesis of identity regarding substance as subject starts with a self-referential concept of identity, that is, coinciding with itself. It is different from all the traditional, non-reflexive concepts of identity alternation, as in the beginning with Leibniz, Hume or Frege , as well as with Quine. The foundation of all consideration and discussion about beingness is that substance is in its conception of self circular, self-referential and a priori identical with itself. Still, this conceptual coinciding-with-itself (...) is also – dialectically – the incongruity of all its substantial qualities with oneself, it is their dissolution and existence. Here, the other, the negative, belongs to the inner conceptual definition of substance itself, and the true in experience and science becomes the process of sequencing of opposite, visible phenomena of consciousness. (shrink)

Kierkegaard is often regarded as an opponent of metaphysics per se. However, he not only implicitly espouses metaphysical positions, but also his understanding of existence rests upon an explicit metaphysical differentiation between being qua actuality and being qua thought, which results in a difference between actuality (Virkelighed) and reality (Realitet). I begin by analyzing an apparent contradiction between two of Kierkegaard’s statements on the relations between being and thought, which leads me both to inquire into that distinction and to retrace (...) the roots of Kierkegaard’s account. Finally, I present Kierkegaard’s final positions and point out some of their existential consequences. (shrink)

The thesis that follows proffers a solution to the mind-matter problem, the problem as to how mind and matter relate. The proposed solution herein is a variant of panpsychism – the theory that all (pan) has minds (psyche) – that we name pansentient monism. By defining the suffix 'psyche' of panpsychism, i.e. by analysing what 'mind' is (Chapter 1), we thereby initiate the effacement of the distinction between mind and matter, and thus advance a monism. We thereafter critically examine (...) the prevalent view, antithetical to a pansentient monism, that mind is not identical to matter but emergent therefrom (Chapter 2). This anti-emergentist critique acts also as a fortification of the Genetic Argument for panpsychism: if mind is not emergent (nor distinct) from matter, mind must always have existed with matter. But what is 'matter'? Chapter 3 investigates what we understand by 'matter', or 'the physical', and exposes it as a highly deficient concept and percept that in concreto points to its identity with that denoted by 'mind'. This also acts as a fortification of the Abstraction Argument for panpsychism, employing a new taxonomy of physicalism and a new taxonomy of the varieties of abstraction. Thus do we reach a monism that is a parsimonious psycho-physical identity theory. But here we face what can be called The Identity Problem for Panpsychism: if our panpsychism is a psycho-physical identity theory, how can it respond to the powerful objections that beset the identity theory of the twentieth century? In Chapter 4 it will be argued that, like emergentism, this psycho-neural identity theory presupposed a deficient concept of 'matter', down to which mind was reduced away, let alone identified. But to identify down phenomena to what is actually an abstraction is to commit failure of explanation. When the theory is amended accordingly, we move from a psycho-neural identity theory to a genuine psycho-physical identity theory that as such can overcome the aforementioned identity problem. Furthermore, as Chapter 5 clarifies, our pansentient monism has, in addition to parsimony, the explanatory power to resolve the problem of mental causation that afflicts both the reductive physicalism of psycho-neural identity theory and the non-reductive physicalism of emergentism, by genuinely identifying physical and mental causation. Jaegwon Kim considers the place of consciousness in a physical world and the nature of mental causation to be the two key components of the mind-matter problem. Through the critical analysis of our prosaic understanding of mind and matter in this thesis, which incorporates the thought of both classical and contemporary thinkers through a novel fusion, it is hoped that both components are addressed and redressed. That is to say that I present this pansentient monism as a plausible, parsimonious, explanatory, and thus, I think, powerful position towards this ever-perplexing mind-matter mystery. -/- [This thesis was passed in January 2019 with viva examination from Galen Strawson and Joel Krueger. (shrink)

Metaphysics of Gender is a branch of Feminist Philosophy in which the metaphysical issues about "Gender" are discussed. Charlotte Witt is a feminist philosopher, who analyzes gender from a particular point of view. Witt names her theory "Uni-Essentialism" which is an essentialist theory of gender, while differing deeply from customary essentialist theories. She avoids the current framework of debate between Realists and Nominalists, because her main question is about the role of gender in one's identity. She says that there (...) are always some conflicts between norms of various social roles one occupies, and for this reason we all need a unifying normative principle. According to Witt, gender is that normative principle, which unifies and organizes all other roles. So, gender is essential for everyone, in an Aristotalian sense. In this paper the Uni-Essentialism thesis of Witt is analyzed and its weaknesses are discussed. Finally we will suggest some points for improvement and modification of the theory. (shrink)

Can there be two things that are completely indistinguishable? This simple question has raised numerous debates throughout the history of philosophy and science. The principle of the identity of indiscernibles claims that no two things can be completely indiscernible. But this thesis has been challenged in quantum physics and continues to be a hot topic in cutting edge areas of mathematics. The question has gained a renewed interest with the possibility of harnessing indistinguishability as a resource in quantum (...) information tasks. This theme issue is devoted to understanding identity and indistinguishability in philosophy and science, gathering an interdisciplinary group of experts in the field. It will allow readers of diverse disciplines to have an updated introduction to the topic. (shrink)

Orthodoxy says that the thesis that composition is identity (CAI) entails universalism: the claim that any collection of entities has a sum. If this is true it counts in favour of CAI, since a thesis about the nature of composition that settles the otherwise intractable special composition question (SCQ) is desirable. But I argue that it is false: CAI is compatible with the many forms of restricted composition, and SCQ is no easier to answer given CAI than (...) otherwise. Furthermore, in seeing why this is the case we reveal an objection to CAI: that it allows for the facts concerning what there is to be settled whilst leaving open the question about what is identical to what. (shrink)

Rockmore’s paper offers a nice discussion on how classical German idealism provides a plausible account of the Parmenidean insight that thought and being are identical and suggests that idealist epistemic constructivism is arguably the most promising approach to cognition. In this short commentary, I will explore the implications of adopting other interpretations of Parmenidean identity thesis, which arguably lead to different conclusions than the ones drawn by Rockmore. En route to disavow the distinction between ontology and epistemology, I (...) argue that one may adopt an approach on cognition which would be immunized to worries that prompt Rockmore’s elaboration and also embrace (at least) some of its benefits. (shrink)

Phineas Gage’s story is typically offered as a paradigm example supporting the view that part of what matters for personal identity is a certain magnitude of similarity between earlier and later individuals. Yet, reconsidering a slight variant of Phineas Gage’s story indicates that it is not just magnitude of similarity, but also the direction of change that affects personal identity judgments; in some cases, changes for the worse are more seen as identity-severing than changes for the better (...) of comparable magnitude. Ironically, thinking carefully about Phineas Gage’s story tells against the thesis it is typically taken to support. (shrink)

This article is a methodological discussion of formal approaches to the question of identity of proofs from a philosophical standpoint. First, an introduction to the question of identity of proofs itself is given, followed by a brief reconstruction of the so-called normalisation thesis, proposed by Dag Prawitz in 1971, in which some of its core mathematical and conceptual traits are presented. After that, a comparison between the normalisation thesis and the more well-known Church-Turing thesis on (...) computability is carried out in three main parts: the first dedicated to highlighting some of the analogies between them; the second, their most remarkable differences; and the third, to the possible relations of dependence between the two. Based on these considerations, some concluding remarks concerning the potential of the normalisation thesis and similar approaches to the question of identity of proofs are made in the last section. (shrink)

Examples suggest that one and the same A may be different Bs, and hence that there is some sort of incompleteness in the unqualified statement that x and y are the same which needs to be eliminated by answering the question “the same what?” One way to make this more precise is by appeal to Geach's idea that identity is relative. In this paper I evaluate Geach's relative identity thesis.

The author argues that uploading does preserve personal identity, at least identity of a certain sort. The fact that we are assuming that computers are capable of embodying all the same type of properties necessary for personal identity means that we can make use of the equivalency thesis. There are two reasons for invoking the equivalency thesis. The first is so that we are not misled by a new form of racism: substratism. The second is (...) that it makes directly relevant an enormous amount of philosophical effort that has gone into exploring the possibility of carbonto‐ carbon transfers. He examines an alternative explanation to somaticism for why people might be reluctant to use Parfit's Teletransporter, namely, fear of the unknown. Finally, the author talks about the type/token (TT) account of personal identity and then see whether the no‐branching argument has any traction against it. (shrink)

This book gathers together thirteen of Peter van Inwagen's essays on metaphysics, several of which have acquired the status of modern classics in their field. They range widely across such topics as Quine's philosophy of quantification, the ontology of fiction, the part-whole relation, the theory of 'temporal parts', and human knowledge of modal truths. In addition, van Inwagen considers the question as to whether the psychological continuity theory of personal identity is compatible with materialism, and defends the thesis (...) that possible states of affairs are abstract objects, in opposition to David Lewis's 'extreme modal realism'. A specially-written introduction completes the collection, which will be an invaluable resource for anyone interested in metaphysics. (shrink)

P. T. Geach, notoriously, holds the Relative Identity Thesis, according to which a meaningful judgment of identity is always, implicitly or explicitly, relative to some general term. ‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term (what Frege calls a Begriffswort or Begriffsausdruck). (P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 69. I maintain that it makes no sense (...) to judge whether things are ‘the same’, or remain ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term - ‘the same F’. (P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, third Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 63f. I am arguing for the thesis that identity is relative. When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this, I hold, 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 - or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought. (P. T. Geach, ‘Identity,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-8), p. 3.) One of the ways Geach seeks to support this is by tying it to the well nigh universally admired Fregean thesis about cardinality. (shrink)

Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) (formerly known as Multiple Personality Disorder) is a condition in which a person appears to possess more than one personality, and sometimes very many. Some recent criminal cases involving defendants with DID have resulted in "not guilty" verdicts, though the defense is not always successful in this regard. Walter Sinnott-Armstrong and Stephen Behnke have argued that we should excuse DID sufferers from responsibility, only if at the time of the act the person was insane (typically (...) delusional); otherwise the presumption should be that persons with DID are indeed responsible for their actions. We find their interpretation of DID and of the way in which the requirements for criminal insanity relate to this condition worrying and likely to result in injustice to DID sufferers. Our thesis is that persons with DID cannot be responsible for their actions if the usual features of the condition are present. A person with DID is a single person in the grip of a very serious mental disorder. By focusing on the features of DID which have, as we argue, the effect of deluding the patient, we try to show that such a person is unable to fulfill the ordinary conditions of responsible agency (namely, autonomy and self-control). (shrink)

Composition as Identity is the thesis that a whole is, strictly and literally, identical to its parts, considered collectively. McDaniel [2008] argues against CAI in that it prohibits emergent properties. Recently Sider [2014] exploited the resources of plural logic and extensional mereology to undermine McDaniel’s argument. He shows that CAI identifies extensionally equivalent pluralities – he calls it the Collapse Principle – and then shows how this identification rescues CAI from the emergentist argument. In this paper I first (...) give a new generalized version of both the arguments. It is more general in that it does not presuppose an atomistic mereology. I then go on to argue that the consequences of CP are rather radical. It entails mereological nihilism, the view that there are only mereological atoms. I finally show that, given a mild assumption about property instantiation, namely that there are no un-instantiated properties, this argument entails that CAI and emergent properties are incompatible after all. (shrink)

The mind-brain identity theory, the thesis that sensations are identical with properties or processes of the brain, was introduced into contemporary discussion by U.T. Place, Herbert Feigl, and J.J.C Smart in the 1950s. Despite its widespread rejection in the following decades, the identity theory has received several carefully articulated defenses in recent years. Aside from developing novel responses to well-known arguments against the identity theory, contemporary identity theorists have argued that the epistemological resources available to (...) support the adoption of identities are more plentiful than has often been supposed; further, they have argued that mind-brain identities allow for the resolution of otherwise intractable explanatory puzzles about the phenomenal properties of experience. From an epistemological perspective, identity theorists have thus argued that a central reason for believing theoretical identities—both mind-brain identities as well as more mundane identities such as water = H2O—stems from the explanatory power that they confer. Yet from an explanatory perspective, identity theorists have maintained that identities cannot themselves be explained; indeed, they have maintained that it is hardly intelligible to request an explanation for an identity. This paper considers these ideas draws out an important tension between them. The central claim is that insofar as identity theorists insist on the explanatorily efficacy of identities, they should concede that there is a good sense in which theoretical identities can be explained. However, it is moreover argued that this concession is not especially problematic and, indeed, ought to be welcomed by identity theorists. (shrink)