Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Author’s Introduction

1. Identity is an equivalence relation, a congruence relation, and a fully determinate relation. Moreover, where identity is concerned, there can be no almosts and no near misses. Identity seems unique.' But that is not enough to show that identity and its peculiarities cannot be accounted for somehow in other terms. It does not show there can be no reduction of sameness to other properties and relations.
2. Philosophers rarely avow the explicit belief that identity must be reducible to other properties and relations. But some such belief must surely have been at work when, a long time ago, Jaakko Hintikka was moved to making a ruling in which indefinitely many philosophers have at one time or another concurred:
   Each possible world contains a number of individuals with certain properties and with certain relations to each other. We have to use these properties and relations to decide which member (if any) of a given possible world is identical with a given member of another possible world. ("Hintikka (Jaakko) - The Semantics of Modal Notions and the Indeterminacy of Ontology", [1970], p.410)
3. Along with a true insight about constraints upon identity, Hintikka here conveys something more questionable, namely his rejection of the idea that a possible world may be specified by saying inter alia that there, in that world. Jack Adams and Jill Jones in particular walk up Bredon Hill and then another possible world may be simply specified by saying that there, in that second world, the very same boy and girl, namely Jack Adams and Jill Jones, walk up Muswell Hill. Why is that rejected? Why can things not be as simple as that?
4. Is the thought that, strictly, the identities of the objects in a world are not to be stipulated in this way but must be founded, however indirectly, in their other properties and relations? Is the thought that, in the two would-be world-specifications just indicated, the names, 'Jack Adams' and 'Jill Jones' are really shorthand in the constructor's vocabulary for descriptions on the basis of which more elaborate identifications of the sort that Hintikka envisages might have been effected; that otherwise - is this the idea? - these vocables are only the names that two persons who are yet to be identified bear in the world under construction?
5. If nobody has any inclination to say something analogous to this about the ordinary properties and relations, then why is the claim so perennially attractive where identity is concerned? Why is identity seen as a poor relation of other properties and relations? Why is it problematic to find Jill Jones in world one and in world two but unproblematic to find the colour blue in world one and in world two? Why are we so tempted to elide the difference between the reasonable claim that we are not free to stipulate in a possible world whatever we like and the questionable claim that the identities in a possible world need a foundation? That is the question I begin from.