Identity, Essence, and Indiscernibility

Abstract

What Kripke calls the ‘dark doctrine of a relation of contingent identity’ appears to violate Leibniz's Law. If x and y are identical, they share all their properties; since x has the property of necessary identity with x, y must have this property as well. But this is a paradoxical result. The statue and its clay clearly stand in some intimate identity-like relation. If the relation is not contingent identity, what is it? This chapter attempts an answer. So-called contingent identicals are ‘coincident’; they may have different transworld careers, but in this world they are just alike.