Indeterminacy Of Identity Research Articles

Indeterminacy of identity and advance directives for death after dementia.

A persistent question in discussions of the ethics of advance directives for euthanasia is whether patients who go through deep psychological changes retain their identity. Rather than seek an account of identity that answers this question, I argue that responsible policy should directly address indeterminacy about identity directly. Three sorts of indeterminacy are distinguished. Two of these-epistemic indeterminacy and metaphysical indeterminacy-should be addressed in laws/policies regarding advance directives for euthanasia.

The Indeterminacy of Identity in Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark

This article sets out to explore the implications of postcolonialism for Irish identity politics, through Tom Murphy’s A Whistle in the Dark. Through the characters of this play, who struggle to define a coherent national identity for themselves in the industrial city of Coventry, Murphy depicts the reality of modern Ireland by locating the play in the pathology of the alienated individual who contradicts the hegemony of Catholic bourgeois nationalist Ireland. By contextualising the liminal aspects of A Whistle in the Dark, the primary aim of the article is to focus on these contradictions and the resulting indeterminate identity that lies at the borderlines of Irish culture. This analysis is informed by Homi Bhabha’s concepts of hybridity and mimicry in relation to the dynamics of colonialism. Through the sense of failure that permeates the play, and the desire to escape the confinements of constructed identity categories, which restrict and trap the characters within ascribed identities, A Whistle in the Dark explores the boundaries between essentialising narratives of Irish identity, and a non-dialectical space. The nature of identity is further complicated by Bhabha’s hybrid voices and performances that allow for an indeterminate plurality of identities to exist in these liminal spaces where they are forced to make their own private myths fuse with the contemporary public identity they must inhabit.

TRADITION, CUSTOM, AND OTHERNESS: THE POLITICS OF IDENTITY IN MOZAMBIQUE

In this article, I discuss the debate on customary authority and “invention of tradition” on the basis of field data from Mozambique, which I place in a larger context provided by scholarly responses prompted by Ranger's thesis, as well as debates on customary authority in Southern Africa. Here two themes are crucial: claims for historical authenticity and the role of boundaries in the definition of group identity. I argue that a strict juxtaposition between custom and tradition is misleading, since a political institution's longevity is in fact determined by both the permanence of its basic structural principles and its inner dynamism. Starting from the premise that “ethnic groups are categories of ascription and identification of the actors themselves,” I show how individuals and groups at the local level use indeterminacy of identity and ambivalency of sociopolitical boundaries in coping with the uncertainties of rural life.

Ontic indeterminacy of identity unscathed

Ontic indeterminacy of identity unscathed

Ontic indeterminacy of identity unscathed

Ontic indeterminacy of identity unscathed

Vague identity and quantum indeterminacy: further reflections

Katherine Hawley (1998) makes some interesting points in criticizing my response (Lowe 1997) to an argument by Harold Noonan (1995) against ontic indeterminacy of identity. My proposed example of such indeterminacy, the target of Noonan's objection, was a quantum-mechanical one (Lowe 1994). I envisaged an electron a being absorbed by an atom and becoming entangled with the single electron already present in the atom's outer shell. Subsequently, I said, an electron b is emitted from the atom's outer shell and my claim was that it is ontically (not just epistemically or semantically) indeterminate whether electron a is identical with electron b. One version of the problem raised by Noonan is this. On the hypothesis that it is indeterminate whether electron a is identical with electron b, electron b seems to have a property which electron a lacks, namely, the property of being such that it is indeterminate whether it was absorbed by the atom. But then it turns out that electron a and electron b differ in their properties and consequently that they are determinately not identical, contrary to the hypothesis. Hence, the hypothesis must be false. Now, I concede to Hawley that my response to Noonan (Lowe 1997) was not entirely satisfactory (but see also Lowe 1998: 67ff., for a more considered response). However, I do not agree with her that ontic indeterminacy claims are coherent only in the case of 'particles which exist only during the period of entanglement' and that 'For particles like Lowe's a and b, which are supposed to survive absorption or emission, ontic indeterminacy is ruled out' (Hawley 1998: 106). It is still my contention that quantum particles are such that they can be determinately distinct at one time and yet not at another (later) time. Once entangled, they are not determinately distinct, but this consequence plausibly does not apply retrospectively to a time before their entanglement. So, provided that such particles can persist through the onset of entanglement, which seems not only intelligible but consistent with the way in which many quantum physicists themselves seem to talk, my contention would appear to hold. However, what I think I ought now to acknowledge is that, once particles have become entangled, they can never thereafter become determinately distinct again. Thus, in my absorption/emission example, what I should have said is the following. Prior to absorption, there are two determinately distinct electrons, one (call it a) which is determinately

Indeterminacy of Identity of Objects and Sets

Indeterminacy of Identity of Objects and Sets

Entities Without Identity

ION: (x)(x s {yiP} P[x/y]) (where P is any formula of classical quantification theory constructed using &, v, -, and universal and existential quantifiers, which does not contain x free, and P[x/y] is the result of replacing every free occurrence of y by an occurrence of x). EXTENSIONALITY: A = B (x)(x s A _ x s B), where 'A' and 'B' are set abstracts as characterized above. The question of the consistency of this kind of set theory with the indeterminacy of identity can be settled by showing that these axioms may hold even when identity is sometimes indeterminate; and that can be established in turn by showing that whenever there is a model for indeterminate identity of the sortdescribed in the first part of this paper, then the model may be extended by the addition This content downloaded from 207.46.13.123 on Tue, 28 Jun 2016 06:50:29 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 12 / Terence Parsons of sets, in such a manner that: