Moderate Monism, Sortal Concepts, and Relative Identity

Abstract

Coincidence (e.g., of a statue and the piece of bronze which constitutes it) comes in two varieties - permanent and temporary. Moderate monism (about coincidence) is the position that permanent coincidence, but not temporary coincidence, entails identity. Extreme monism (a version of which is stage theory (Sider 2001, Hawley 2001)) is the position that even temporary coincidence entails identity (those who deny that there are merely temporary coincidents are another sort of extreme monist, I shall not be considering this position in this paper).' Pluralists are opponents of monism tout court.2 The intuitively obvious, commonsensical position (= my own position) is moderate monism. It is therefore important to see if it can be sustained.I first outline the moderate monist position and compare and contrast it with other metaphysical positions with which it is often associated. I then indicate the arguments for moderate monism that seem to me most persuasive, drawing on earlier work of my own (Noonan 1993) and Johnston (1992). Next I turn to three criticisms of moderate monism, by Jim Stone (2005a; 2005c), Eric Olson (2006; 2007) and Penelope Mackie (2008 and unpublished). In responding to these criticisms I maintain (a) that sortal concepts satisfy de dicto modal principles that constrain the histories and spatiotemporal surroundings of the things falling under them and that may be thought of as specifying their criteria of identity, (b) that a distinction is required between restricted sortal quantification and unrestricted quantification over the things falling under a sortal concept (between e.g., 'some statue is . . .' and 'something is a statue and is . . .') and (c) that reflecting on the arguments which enforce this distinction provides the best ground for accepting that 'identity is relative' in one sense familiar from the writings of Peter Geach (1980), namely that identity under a sortal concept at a time (expressible in the form 'is the same S as at i') does not entail absolute, Leibnizian identity. I shall suggest that one way (not the only way) of combining these ideas is to defend a variant of stage theory which is a sort of synthesis of some of the ideas of Hawley (2001) and Sider (2001), but does not depart so far from standard perdurantism and which yields a variant on moderate monism which may be thought of as moderately extreme monism (see Noonan 1976).II begin by outlining the moderate monist position. According to the moderate monist if God creates ex nihilo (at ti) a bronze statue and later (at tlO) annihilates it, destroying both the statue and the bronze of which it is composed (so we have a case of permanent coincidence - Scenario I), the statue and the piece of bronze are identical. If, however, God simply radically reshapes the bronze at tlO (so that we have a case of same-origin temporary coincidence, as Mackie [2008] calls it - Scenario II), the statue ceases to exist and the piece of bronze survives, so despite their coincidence up to tlO the statue and the piece of bronze are two things.Since the statue in Scenario I could not have been radically reshaped without being destroyed, but the piece of bronze in Scenario I could, to conform to Leibniz's Law the moderate monist must accept that modal predication is 'Abelardian' (Noonan 1991), so that the reference of, e.g., 'could have been radically reshaped without being destroyed' is different when attached to 'the statue' and 'the piece of bronze'. One way of fleshing this out is to give a Lewisean counterpart-theoretic account of modal predication, according to which 'could have been radically reshaped without being destroyed' stands for the property has a statue counterpart which is radically reshaped and not destroyed when attached to 'the statue', but stands for the property has apiece of bronze counterpart which is radically reshaped but not destroyed when attached to 'the piece of bronze'. However, acceptance of the Abelardian character of modal predication, which is obligatory for the moderate monist (and the stage theorist) - unless, of course, he endorses a comprehensive Quinean scepticism about any grade of modal involvement beyond modality de dicto - does not require acceptance of Lewisean counterpart theory, or a fortiori, of Lewisean modal realism (see Gupta 1980). …