Cambridge Changes Revisited: Why Certain Relational Changes Are Indispensable

Abstract

Peter Geach and others suppose that change in an object's relational properties absent any change in its intrinsic properties (relational change) is not a genuine change in that object but only a "mere Cambridge change." I explain and reject two strategies challenging Geach's position. I then present my own argument against Geach which depends on the recognition of entities identified in terms of their emergent properties, i.e. properties not reducible to physical properties. I provide some examples of such entities (social phenomena, historical events, artworks) and address the problem of finding a criterion for distinguishing genuine from nongenuine change.

Everyone Can Change a Musical Work

“…As will emerge from the discussion, the difficulties that these views meet are similar to the ones faced by theories which focus on the identity over time of people and ordinary objects. 1 The idea that real change is change in intrinsic properties is supported also by Dodd (2007, p. 54) and Rohrbaugh (2003, p. 181) but not everyone agrees with this assumption (Weberman, 1999;McMillan, 2018;Friedell, 2020). To my knowledge, there are no independently motivated reasons for choosing one assumption over the other.…”

Don’t Worry, Be Happy: The Gettability of Ultimate Meaning

“…20 There is room for debate as to whether relational properties and Cambridge changes are fully real or have some sort of secondclass metaphysical status. 21 What is not debatable is that relational properties, such as beingthesisterofX or beingtheelectedrepresentativeforY, are routinely predicated of lives and taken to partly constitute a person's identity. Indeed, looked at globally, the view that relational properties are to be disregarded and that a person's life is to be understood as a separate, distinct unit of analysis (biological or otherwise) is atypical or WEIRD.…”

Unveiling the `International': Process, Identity and Alterity

“…The concept of relationality here underlines that social continuants are not selfcontained, but are defined by their extrinsicism. Social continuants' identities are an extrinsic property in the sense that they are dependent 'wholly or partly on something other than that thing', 71 or in other words, 'they are not self-contained because entities are what they are partly in virtue of their relations outside of themselves'. 72 In our example of the French collective political identity, one has to understand it as participating in a continuous process of identification of what it itself is vis-à-vis alternative understandings and representations which transcend the inside/outside divide.…”