Relative Identity and Cardinality
Canadian Journal of Philosophy 29 (2):205 - 223 (1999)
Abstract
Peter Geach famously holds that there is no such thing as absolute identity. There are rather, as Geach sees it, a variety of relative identity relations, each essentially connected with a particular monadic predicate. Though we can strictly and meaningfully say that an individual a is the same man as the individual b, or that a is the same statue as b, we cannot, on this view, strictly and meaningfully say that the individual a simply is b. It is difficult to find anything like a persuasive argument for this doctrine in Geach's work. But one claim made by Geach is that his account of identity is the account most naturally aligned with Frege's widely admired treatment of cardinality. And though this claim of an affinity between Frege's and Geach's doctrines has been challenged, the challenge has been resisted. William Alston and Jonathan Bennett, indeed, go further than Geach to argue that Frege's doctrine implies Geach's. If Alston and Bennett are right, then those who favor a broadly Fregean treatment of cardinality have no choice but to adopt Geach's doctrine of relative identity. And because contemporary set-theoretic accounts of cardinality are essentially Fregean in all respects relevant to this issue (see §11 below), it follows from Alston and Bennett's claim that virtually every standard modern treatment of cardinality requires a 'relativized' treatment of identity. The purpose of this paper is to argue against the implication claimed by Alston and Bennett. Despite some superficial similarities between Frege's treatment of cardinality and Geach's treatment of identity, the two doctrines are fundamentally opposed. Frege's account of cardinality, and its set-theoretic descendants, are all inconsistent with the claim that identity is 'relative' in Geach's senseAuthor's Profile
ISBN(s)
0045-5091
DOI
10.1080/00455091.1999.10717511
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Citations of this work
Composition and Relative Counting.Massimiliano Carrara & Giorgio Lando - 2017 - Dialectica 71 (4):489-529.
Composition as Identity.Meg Wallace - 2009 - Dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Cardinality and Identity.Massimiliano Carrara & Elisabetta Sacchi - 2007 - Journal of Philosophical Logic 36 (5):539-556.
References found in this work
Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Studienausgabe mit dem Text der Centenarausgabe.Gottlob Frege - 1884 - Breslau: Wilhelm Koebner Verlag.
Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik: Eine logische mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl.Gottlob Frege - 2018 - Hansebooks.
Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Eine logisch mathematische Untersuchung über den Begriff der Zahl.Gottlob Frege - 1884 - Wittgenstein-Studien 3 (2):993-999.