Gibbard on Contingent Identity

Our question is, "Are Lumpl and Goliath identical, or distinct indiscernibles?"

Gibbard distinguishes between portions of clay, pieces of clay, and statues (token) made of clay.

A portion of clay is just some clay. It might be scattered, brought together into a single piece, and then mixed with other clay.

A piece (or lump) of clay is some portion of clay that is all stuck together and not stuck to any other clay that exists over an interval of time.

A (clay) statue is a piece of clay that is in a certain shape.

He argues that vagueness isn't important for present purposes. I'm just going to ignore it.

Part of what makes an object an object is how it is identified and reidentified, its identity conditions. (Quine: "No entity without identity.") That means that it is critical in making sense of objects, that we know what identity is.

Quine and Gibbard agree (at least) on the following principle (The Indiscernibility of Identicals): If and has property , then so does .

Since Grawp and the lump of clay came into existence at different times, they can't be the same thing. (The problems this kind of thing causes has led a surprisingly large number of philosophers to conclude that only time slices "really" exist.) That means that there are (at least) two things made of clay on the desk. But that seems pretty clearly crazy. (The point about 1 or 2 is central because identity and counting are closely related, and identity is central.) There is also, at least, a third clay thing on the table, namely, a portion. The conclusion, it seems, must be, that counting is useless. That is false, but at least Gibbard and Kripke seem to be stuck with it, and it is not clear that Quine avoids it.

Geach is the only one that is in the clear: counting involves identity, therefore, for Geach, relative identity, and so there is no such thing as counting things, only statues or pieces or portions, and so on, separately.

I just simultaneously created the statue Goliath and the lump Lumpl, and then simultaneously destroyed them (it?). One thing or two? Gibbard answers, quite plausibly, one, since Goliath and Lumpl occupy exactly the same spatiotemporal region and are spatiotemporally constituted in the same way. There just couldn't be, Gibbard intuits, anything more to what an object is than that, and so, Goliath and Lumpl are just two names for the same object.

I just simultaneously created the statue Glumdalclitch and the lump Piecel. Are Glumdalclitch and Piecel identical? We have no way to know, since that will depend on whether I put the portion of clay away by tearing it or smushing it. In the first case, they are now identical, but in the second, they are already, now distinct. Goliath and Lumpl were in the same boat until I tore its head off. Thus, before I did so, Goliath and Lumpl were identical but might not have been (since I might have smushed instead of tearing). Thus, Gibbard says that Goliath and Lumpl were contingently (that is, not necessarily) identical.

Kripke, of course, takes the central point of "Identity and Necessity" to be that there can be no contingent identities. Gibbard is doing this to refute Kripke. Is Gibbard, in refuting Kripke, taking the side of either Quine or Geach? Not Geach, since Gibbard thinks that there are (at least) two things on the table in the Grawp case, while Geach thinks that the question makes no sense. Not Quine, since Gibbard's evidence that Goliath might not have been identical with Lumpl concerns what could possibly have happened, while Quine thinks that our basis for answering such questions comes from our (actual) observations of how language is used, and so has nothing to do with mysterious things like possible worlds.

Gibbard doesn't discuss Geach at all or Quine in any detail, he confronts Kripke. He asks, if we rigidly designate Goliath/Lumpl, which one is designated, Goliath or Lumpl?

-- ShaughanLavine - 06 Feb 200