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A Curious Plural

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

T. S. Champlin
T. S. Champlin
Affiliation:
University of Hull
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Extract

Statements of identity with a plural subject, of the form ‘They are (were, etc.) the same person (thing, etc.),’ as illustrated in each of the answers to the above two questions, give rise to a philosophical problem.

Type
Articles
Information
Philosophy , Volume 68 , Issue 266 , October 1993 , pp. 435 - 455
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1993

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References

1 They will be thinking of Frege's discussion of how it is possible for a statement of identity to be informative in Frege, 's ‘On Sense and Meaning’ in Geach, Peter and Black, Max (eds), Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), third edition, pp. 56–78.Google Scholar

2 Frege talks of Gleichheit (=‘equality’) but he says in a footnote that he uses this word in the sense of Identität (=‘identity’) (Frege, , ‘On Sense and Meaning’, p. 56).Google Scholar

3 Op. cit., p. 56.

4 The English translation by Max Black of Frege's die Art des Gegebenseins as ‘mode of presentation’ is too high-flown: it loses, to no advantage, the natural simplicity of Frege's German in his example in which the single point of intersection of three straight lines in a geometrical figure is given as we say both in German and in English, in several different ways by means of different pairs of coordinates (Frege, , ‘On Sense and Meaning’, p. 57).Google Scholar

5 Quine, W. V., Quiddities: an Intermittently Philosophical Dictionary (Cambridge, Mass, and London, England: The Belnap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), p. 89.Google Scholar

6 On the feeling, which evidently Quine shares, that the identity of a thing with itself provides us with an infallible paradigm of identity see Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Philosophical Investigations, remarks 215–6.Google Scholar

7 Frege, , ‘On Sense and Meaning’, p. 59.Google Scholar

8 Quoted in Quine, , Quiddities, p. 232.Google Scholar

9 The alleged use-mention confusion in Leibniz's various formulations of his law is sympathetically discussed in Mates, Benson, The Philosophy of Leibniz: Metaphysics and Language (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 123–30.Google Scholar