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Origin and identity

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Notes and references

  1. S. Kripke, ‘Naming and Necessity’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman (eds.), Semantics of Natural Language (Dordrecht, 1972), pp. 312–314.

  2. For one account of this distinction, see Michael Dummett, ‘What is a theory of meaning? (II)’, in: Truth and Meaning, ed. by Evans and McDowell (Oxford 1976), p. 89.

  3. See D. Parfit, ‘Lewis, Perry and What Matters’, in: The Identities of Persons, ed. by A. O. Rorty (California, 1976), pp. 91–107, esp. footnote 18.

  4. This argument was suggested to me by J. L. Mackie.

  5. See. J. L. Mackie, ‘De what re is de re modality?’, in: Journal of Philosophy 71 (1974), p. 560.

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  6. An anti-essentialist cannot consistently deny that there is such a world as w, on pain of making the pair of the propagule and the location of the tree's origination essential to it. But this argument would not trouble someone who wished to propose, as an alternative to (K), that the place and time of an organism's origination is essential to it. In this paper, I will have nothing to say about such a person.

  7. Obviously, the claim I make here would be disputed by a counterpart theorist. Since I do not have the space to argue against this theory here, it will have to be another premiss of my treatment that objects exist in more than one possible world.

  8. I am grateful to David Charles for comments on one earlier version of this section and especially to Gareth Evans for spotting a flaw in another.

  9. Suppose that all the outputs have the same career in their worlds. Then identities compatible with the non-compossibility requirement will hold in both models or neither.

  10. This sentence and its predecessor are due to Christopher Peacocke, for whose general encouragement in the preparation of this paper I am grateful.

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  1. New College, Oxford

    Graeme Forbes

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  1. Graeme Forbes
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Forbes, G. Origin and identity. Philosophical Studies 37, 353–362 (1980). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00354904

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