Persistence and modality

Synthese 198 (Suppl 6):1425-1438 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

It seems plausible to say that what changes an entity can or cannot survive depends on its persistence conditions, and that these depend, in turn, on its sortal kind. It might seem to follow that an entity cannot belong to two sortal kinds with potentially conflicting persistence conditions. Notoriously, though, this conclusion is denied by ‘contingent identity’ theorists, who hold, for example, that a permanently coincident statue and piece of clay are identical, although the persistence conditions associated with the kinds statue and piece of clay are potentially conflicting. A clash with Leibniz’s Law is avoided by treating modal predicates as what Harold Noonan has called ‘Abelardian predicates’, as in the version of ‘inconstant’ counterpart theory developed by David Lewis. In addition to other difficulties, however, there is a question whether this ‘Abelardian’ theory does justice to the intuitions expressed in such statements as that the piece of clay could, while the statue could not, have survived a radical reshaping of its matter. I present an argument, which I call ‘the vacuous satisfaction argument’, for the conclusion that the theory does indeed fail to capture the significance of such de re modal statements.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Sortal Concepts and Modality.Penelope Mackie - 2013 - University of Nottingham.
Sortal concepts and modality.Penelope Mackie - 2013 - In Christian Hubert-Rodier (ed.), None. Hôtel des Bains Éditions.
Coincidence and identity.Penelope Mackie - 2008 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 62:151-176.
Modal Identities and de Re Necessity.Greg Ray - 1992 - Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
David Lewis on Persistence.Katherine Hawley - 2015 - In Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis. Oxford, UK: Wiley. pp. 237–249.
Constitution and kind membership.Michael C. Rea - 2000 - Philosophical Studies 97 (2):169-193.
Constitution and Identity.John Biro - 2018 - Erkenntnis 83 (6):1127-1138.
Stuff and coincidence.Thomas J. McKay - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (11):3081-3100.
Indeterminism and persistence.Thomas Müller - 2011 - Philosophia Naturalis 49 (1):113-136.
A grounding solution to the grounding problem.Noël B. Saenz - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2193-2214.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-04-10

Downloads
91 (#171,724)

6 months
11 (#127,761)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Penelope Mackie
Nottingham University

Citations of this work

Ordinary objects.Daniel Z. Korman - 2011 - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Add more citations

References found in this work

On the Plurality of Worlds.David K. Lewis - 1986 - Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell.
On the Plurality of Worlds.David Lewis - 1986 - Revue Philosophique de la France Et de l'Etranger 178 (3):388-390.
Sameness and substance.David Wiggins - 1980 - Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Sameness and Substance Renewed.David Wiggins - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press. Edited by David Wiggins.
On the Plurality of Worlds.Allen Stairs - 1988 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 49 (2):333-352.

View all 32 references / Add more references