Abstract
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.1 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.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
I make this claim in Chapter Six of Sameness and Substance Renewed (Wiggins [2001]). Several extended passages of the present article appear in another form in Sameness and Substance Renewed. They appear here by kind permission of Cambridge University Press.
As is well known, Saul Kripke has spoken out eloquently against rulings of this kind. See Kripke [ 1980 ]. If his efforts had eradicated completely the underlying philosophical conceptions that have seemed to sustain such a ruling, then I should not have begun my speech here.
See John Wallace [1964]. See pp. 80ff. John Wallace’s original sentence was “in every forest there grows more than one tree”. Timothy Williamson points out to me that the sentence it would be better for Wallace to consider is “In every forest there grow many trees”. Unlike “more than one”, “many” does not reimport identity. Then (Williamson suggests), in order to make Wallace’s point properly secure, let the quantificational language be treated as possessing a “many” quantifier as primitive. The philosophical significance of Quine’s elimination recipe ought not to depend on the question whether “many” is admissible as a logical constant.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2002 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Wiggins, D. (2002). Identity and Supervenience. In: Bottani, A., Carrara, M., Giaretta, P. (eds) Individuals, Essence and Identity. Topoi Library, vol 4. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_12
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-1866-0_12
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5988-8
Online ISBN: 978-94-017-1866-0
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive