In May 2020, with the coronavirus
still raging, President Trump said he was ready to “turn the page on all that”,
and announced that the covid Task Force that had been led (apparently at the
bottom of a mine-shaft somewhere) by the Vice-President (whose name escapes me at present, and shall
continue to do so in future) was being “disbanded”. (In the French press reports of the anouncement, this verb was
rendered démantelé -- ‘dismantled’,
which sounds even more alarming.)
That offhand ad-lib caused consternation, so he “re-spoke” himself (verb
©WoDJ 2020, All Rights Reserved).
He now states that the Task Force will continue "indefinitely" -- albeit with
substitute members and different mission. -- The young reporter who was obliged to recount all this on NPR, noticed a certain “philosophical question” here,
whether this would be the “same” task force or not.
The philosophical problem alluded to is that of Continuity of Identity, with many ramifications ancient and
modern. We have touched on some
examples in these posts:
Meanwhile, herewith a handful of miscellaneous quotations,
illustrating the variety of concerns:
Simon Blackburn (Think
(1999), p. 127) quotes the joke about Irish axe that had been in the family for
generations, the head having been replaced three times and the helve six; and
asks whether Theseus’ ship, rebuilt plank by plank over the course of the
voyage until no original molecule remained, was the “same” ship; and if so,
what if someone had saved all the discarded planks and built a replica, this
with all the original molecules, was that the “same” ship as well.
.
A modern example, with wry phrasing:
The truck had
been a Renault back in the twenties, but had become, over time, a collection of
replacement parts cannibalized
from every sort of machine.
-- Alan Furst, The
Spies of Warsaw (2008), p. 146
And with a quite different topology:
The Romans who traversed the plains
of Hungary suppose that they
passed several navigable rivers ..
but there is reason to suspect that the winding stream of the Theiss … might present itself in different
places under different names.
-- Edward Gibbon, The Decline
and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-1788)
Of current concern among Anglo-Saxon analytic philosophers:
Since these
world-lines define the individuals we quantify over when we use modal logic
(more accurately, when we ‘quantify into’ modal contexts), we do not have
well-defined individuals at our disposal in any realistically quantified modal
logic.
-- Jaakko Hintikka, “Quine on Who’s
Who”, in Hahn & Schilpp, eds., The Philosophy of W. V. Quine (1986),
p. 210
The Quinean view:
view helps one appreciate that
there is no reason why my first and fifth decades should not, like my head and
foot, count as parts of the same man, however dissimilar. There need be no unchanging kernel
to constitute me the same man
in both decades, any more
than there need be some peculiarly
Quinian textural quality, common to the protoplasm of my head and feet; though both are possible.
-- W.V.O. Quine, Word and Object
(1960), p. 171
No comments:
Post a Comment