Unity without identity: A new look at material constitution

Midwest Studies in Philosophy

Volumn 23, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 144-165

  Baker, Lynne Rudder ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 12144282642     PISSN: 03636550     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/1475-4975.00008     Document Type: Article

References (31)

1. For recent debate, see, for example, David Wiggins in Sameness and Substance (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).
2. Also, see Mark Johnston, "Constitution Is Not Identity," Mind 101 (1992): 89-105.
3. Johnston was responding to the recent work on "contingent identity" by, e.g., David Lewis, "Counterparts and Their Bodies," Journal of Philosophy 68 (1971): 203-11;
4. Allan Gibbard, "Contingent Identity," Journal of Philosophical Logic 4 (1975): 187-221;
5. Anil Gupta, The Logic of Common Nouns (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980);
6. and Denis Robinson, "Re-Identifying Matter," Philosophical Review 81 (1982): 317-42.
7. For an excellent collection of articles espousing different answers to the question, see Material Constitution: A Reader, Michael Rea, ed. (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997).
8. and Sydney Shoemaker in Identity, Cause and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986) - have proposed that persons and bodies are related in a way similar to what I am calling "constitution." I see as kindred spirits all who construe the relation as a kind of composition without identity.
9. Michael B. Burke, "Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper: A Challenge to the Standard Account," Analysis 52 (1992): 12-17.
10. See his "Identity, Essence, and Indiscernibility," Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 293-314. Many who use the term "contingent identity" do distinguish that relation from genuine identity, which is construed (rightly, I think) as a necessary relation. I think that it is misleading to insist that "contingent identity" names a relation that is not identity.
11. Denial of the identity of the statue and the piece of marble does not by itself commit one to constitution. An alternative to constitution is to construe objects as four-dimensional space-time worms that have temporal parts; then, although the statue and the piece of marble are not identical, they have current temporal "stages" that are identical. I cannot discuss this alternative here. See David Lewis, "Postscripts to 'Survival and Identity,'" in Philosophical Papers, Vol. I (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983): 76-77.
12. For a critique of the temporal-parts view, see Judith Jarvis Thomson, "Parthood and Identity across Time," Journal of Philosophy 80 (1983): 201-20.
13. I am assuming that the piece of marble that now constitutes David is the same piece of marble as one of a different shape that was once in a quarry. If you think that shape is essential to pieces of marble, then change the example to the one I used in "Why Constitution Is Not Identity," in which the statue Discobolus comes into existence at the same time as the piece of bronze that constitutes it. See my "Why Constitution Is Not Identity," Journal of Philosophy 94 (1997): 599-621.
14. According to Robert C. Sleigh, Jr., Leibniz meant his "law" to be understood like this: "if individual x is distinct from individual y then there is some intrinsic, non-relational property F that x has and y lacks, or vice versa" ("Identity of Indiscernibles," in A Companion to Metaphysics, Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa, eds. [Oxford: Blackwell, 1995]: 234).
15. This consideration leads straight to a counterexample to the conviction that "if y is a paradigm F and x is intrinsically exactly like y, then x is an F." Using sophisticated metaphysical arguments, Mark Johnston aims to undermine this principle in "Constitution Is Not Identity"; Harold Noonan aims to rebut Johnston in "Constitution Is Identity," Mind 102 (1993): 133-46.
16. Cf. Ruth Barcan Marcus, "Modalities and Intensional Languages," in Modalities: Philosophical Essays (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993): 3-23, first published in Synthese 13 (1961): 303-22. So I don't take what is called "contingent identity" to be identity; and I'm unsure whether what is called "relative identity" is coherent. In any case, I am not committed to relative identity.
17. For a defense of relative identity, see Peter Geach, "Identity, " in Logic Matters (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1972): 238-49.
18. For criticisms of relative identity, see John Perry, "The Same F," Philosophical Review 79 (1970): 181-200,
19. Saul A. Kripke, "Identity and Necessity," in Identity and Individuation, Milton K. Munitz, ed. (New York: New York University, 1971): 137. Kripke continues: "And this is so even if the property F is itself of the form of necessarily having some other property G, in particular that of necessarily being identical to a certain object."
20. Constitution, as I am construing it, differs in important ways from Dean W. Zimmerman's construal in "Theories of Masses and Problems of Constitution," Philosophical Review 104 (1995): 53-110. Zimmerman takes the relata of constitution to be masses of kinds of stuff. He also permits x and y to constitute one another (74), whereas I require asymmetry. In any case, Zimmerman finds the alleged differences between coincidents ungrounded, and concludes that "coincident physical objects are not to be countenanced" (90). I believe that my account of borrowing, together with my rejection of the thesis that all essential properties are intrinsic, dissolves the difficulties that Zimmerman sees.
21. Thus, constitution must be sharply distinguished from supervenience. Failure to distinguish between supervenience and constitution has caused a great deal of confusion in the philosophy of mind. See my Explaining Attitudes: A Practical Approach to the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995): 132.
22. For detailed discussions of supervenience, see Jaegwon Kim's Supervenience and Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
23. For an interesting discussion of stuff and things, see Vere Chappell, "Matter," Journal of Philosophy 70 (1973): 679-96.
24. A recent example may be found in Michael Delia Rocca, "Essentialists and Essentialism," Journal of Philosophy 93 (1996): 186-202. In "Why Constitution Is Not Identity," I have a direct argument against Della Rocca.
25. Gibbard, "Contingent Identity," 191.
26. E.g., with respect to nonessential properties that are such that they may not be rooted outside the times at which they are had (as defined by Chisholm), Chisholm thinks that ordinary things (like tables) borrow such properties from what constitutes them, and not vice versa. See Roderick Chisholm, Person and Object: A Study in Metaphysics (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1976): 100-101.
27. The counterexamples that I give to the bottom-up-borrowing-only claim in the text all concern nonessential properties, and all conform to Chisholm's definition of properties that are such that they may not be rooted outside the times at which they are had. So, I think that they are counterexamples to Chisholm's view. For a detailed discussion, see my "Persons in Metaphysical Perspective" in The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm (Library of Living Philosophers, Vol. 25) (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing, 1997): 433-53.
28. Burke, "Copper Statues and Pieces of Copper, 14.
29. John Perry, "The Same F." Notice that my construal no more invokes relative identity than does Perry's.
30. Harold Noonan comments, "It is a deeply engrained conviction in many philosophical circles that if x is an F and y is an F and x and y are not identical then x and y cannot legitimately be counted as one F." He notes, however, that it "is perfectly possible to count by a relation weaker than, i.e., not entailing, identity." See "Constitution Is Identity," 138. In discussing fission cases of persons, David Lewis justifies counting by a weaker relation than identity in "Survival and Identity," in The Identities of Persons, AmElie Oksenberg Rorty, ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1976): 26-28.
31. E.g., see Peter Unger, "There Are No Ordinary Things," Synthese 71 (1979): 117-54;