Original scientific paper

Occasional Identity or Occasional Reference?

H. E. Baber orcid.org/0000-0003-1430-7065 ; University of San Diego – Department of Philosophy, 5998 Alcalá Park, San Diego, CA 92110, USA

Abstract

André Gallois argues that individuals that undergo fission are on some occasions identical, but on others distinct. Occasional identity however, is metaphysically costly. I argue that we can get all the benefits of occasional identity without the metaphysical costs. On the proposed account, the names of ordinary material objects refer indeterminately to stages that belong to reference classes determined by the context of utterance or temporal adverbs. In addition, temporal markers indicating the perspective from which we count objects and assign properties to them determine how many count and what is true of them. So, as Gallois holds, the truth value of claims about what is true at a time may change over time and, where fission or fusion occur, does change. The current account, however, secures this result without commitment to occasional identity: reference, predication and counting are “occasional”; identity is not.

Keywords

Fission; identity; occasional identity; persistence; reference; survival

Hrčak ID:

150937

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/150937

Publication date:

31.12.2015.

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