Butler’s Distinction Defended: The Nonindexical Context-Sensitivity of ‘Identity’

Abstract

In The Analogy of Religion, Joseph Butler drew a substantial distinction between identity in the loose and popular sense and identity in the strict and philosophical sense. This distinction—I will call it ‘Butler’s distinction’—seems to reflect our everyday speech involving identity-judgments and seems to be useful when the truth-values of identity-sentences are in question. However, Butler’s distinction has received little attention from philosophers, with a few exceptions, such as Roderick Chisholm and Donald Baxter. In this paper, I argue that Butler’s distinction can be defended appropriately in terms of nonindexical contextualism, according to which an expression has the same intension in any contexts, while its extension is sensitive with regard to the circumstances of evaluation of the contexts. Applying this semantic theory to the expression ‘identity’ with the help of Chisholm/Baxter’s ideas, that is, adding a standard of counting into the circumstances of evaluation of the truth-values of identity-sentences allows us to resolve some questions and difficulties regarding Butler’s distinction. What this implies is that the distinction has not only the initial intuitive appeal, but also the semantic ground supported by the nonindexical context-sensitivity of ‘identity’. After pointing out that a standard of counting is often given by sortal concepts and that the combination of the nonindexical context-sensitivity of ‘identity’ with the constitution view is thus very coherent, I conclude the paper by suggesting some consequences on the issues of sortal-relative identity and composition as identity.