Arguing for Non-identity: A Response to King and Frances

Abstract

Jeffrey King and Bryan Frances are both critical of my paper, ‘The Nonidentity of a Thing and its Matter’ (Fine 2003), though in rather different ways. King engages in carpet bombing; his aim is to destroy every argument in sight, even to the extent of showing that the linguistic data cited by the paper favours the monist rather than the pluralist. Frances, by contrast, engages in strategic warfare; by ‘taking out’ certain key arguments, he attempts to demolish the paper as a whole. I remain unmoved — and, I hope, unscathed — by their attacks. King’s carpet bombing may cause a great deal of collateral damage but not to its intended target; and Frances’s strategic bombing may hit its target but without inflicting much harm. Still, their papers raise many interesting issues not discussed—or, at least, not properly discussed— in my original paper; and I am grateful to them for providing me with the opportunity to take these issues into account. My response will be in three main parts: I begin by outlining the central line of argument of my original paper (Sect. 1); I then discuss King’s criticisms of the paper (Sects 2, 3, 4); and finally I turn to Frances’s criticisms (Sect. 5). I have tried to make my response reasonably self-contained and to bring out the independent significance of the issues under discussion but it would be helpful, all the same, if the reader had all three papers at hand.