The fission of a person involves what common sense describes as a single person surviving as two distinct people. Thus, say most metaphysicians, this paradox shows us that common sense is inconsistent with the transitivity of identity. Lewis's theory of overlapping persons, buttressed with tensed identity, gives us one way to reconcile the common sense claims. Lewis's account, however, implausibly says that reference to a person about to undergo fission is ambiguous. A better way to reconcile the claims of common sense, one that avoids this ambiguity, is to recognize branching persons, persons who have multiple pasts or futures.
Kim argues that weak and global supervenience are too weak to guarantee any sort of dependency. Of the three original forms of supervenience, strong, weak, and global, each commonly wielded across all branches of philosophy, two are thus cast aside as uninteresting or useless. His arguments, however, fail to appreciate the strength of weak and global supervenience. I investigate what weak and global supervenience relations are functionally and how they relate to strong supervenience. For a large class of properties, weak and global supervenience are equivalent to strong supervenience. I then offer a series of arguments showing that it is precisely because of their strength, not their weakness, that both weak and global supervenience are useless in characterizing any dependencies of interest to philosophers. Keywords Supervenience AE Anomalous monism Weak and global supervenience are uselessTo say that A properties supervene on B properties is merely to say that A properties are a function of B properties, or, more perspicuously, that which A properties a thing has is a function of which B properties it has. It is not to say that A properties depend on B properties, for A properties can be a function of B properties also in virtue of A being identical to B, in virtue of B depending on A, or in virtue of A and B both depending on C. 1 Nonetheless, even though supervenience is merely a functional relation and not a newly discovered type of dependency, as many once thought, a dependency relation of some kind, or, in the limiting case, an identity
Puzzles about persistence and change through time, i.e., about identity across time, have foundered on confusion about what it is for 'two things' to be have 'the same thing' at a time. This is most directly seen in the dispute over whether material objects can occupy exactly the same place at the same time. This paper defends the possibility of such coincidence against several arguments to the contrary. Distinguishing a temporally relative from an absolute sense of 'the same', we see that the intuition, 'this is only one thing', and the dictum, 'two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time', are individuating things at a time rather than absolutely and are therefore compatible with coincidence. Several other objections philosophers have raised ride on this same ambiguity.Burke, originating what has become the most popular objection to coincidence, argues that if coincidence is possible there would be no explanation of how objects that are qualitatively the same at a time could belong to different sorts. But we can explain an object's sort by appealing to its properties at other times. Burke's argument to the contrary equivocates on different notions of 'cross-time identity' and 'the statue'. From a largely negative series of arguments emerges a positive picture of what it means to say multiple things coincide and of why an object's historical properties explain its sort rather than vice versa -in short, of how coincidence is possible. Synthese (2006) 148: 401-423
A radical metaphysical theory typically comes packaged with a semantic theory that reconciles those radical claims with common sense. The metaphysical theory says what things exist and what their natures are, while the semantic theory specifies, in terms of these things, how we are to interpret everyday language. Thus may we "think with the learned, and speak with the vulgar." This semantic accommodation of common sense, however, can end up undermining the very theory it is designed to protect. This paper is a case study, showing in detail how one popular version of temporal parts theory is self-undermining. This raises the specter that the problem generalizes to other metaphysical theories.The traditional flavor of temporal parts theory, Worm Theory, claims that everyday objects are four-dimensional space-time worms. An alternative flavor, Slice Theory, claims that objects are not space-time worms but are instead momentary slices of these worms. The differences, we find, are not nearly as great as advertised. In fact, the differences in the two metaphysical theories are entirely masked by compensating differences in the accompanying semantic theories. As a result, the two theories generate exactly the same truth conditions. Common sense says that I was born years ago. Slice Theory adopts a semantic theory that accommodates such claims, but in doing so, it also endorses the claim that I, like other everyday objects, persist and thus do not exist for a mere moment. That is, the metaphysical claims constitutive of Slice Theory are denied by the very semantic theory Slice Theory adopts to accommodate common sense. Slice Theory thus undermines itself.Metaphysicians make many claims that at least appear to fly in the face of common sense. "Only ideas exist!" "Only simples exist!" "Many objects occupy exactly the same place at a time!" Quite often, however, they C
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