RE: counterparts

["Bernie Doeser" <bernie@doeser.org>]

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Coming to philosophy late in life I am able to recognise how philosophical
issues have been grappled with in what I hesitate to call, in this esteemed
company, "the real world".

The issue of identity is one which caused great difficulty to the designers
of relational databases in the late 1980's. Most databases hold information
about people and things, and misunderstanding the nature of information
about objects results in problems using those databases. A great deal of
research was done on a new subject - Meta-data.

Let me give an example here. People struggled with finding a "unique
identifier" for a person. They began with their name, and recognising
quickly that names are not a good signifier of identity they moved onto more
esoteric identifiers such as social security/NI number, but not everyone has
one of those, and they can be forged. Then people moved onto combination
identifiers - are you the Fred Bloggs, born in Norfolk, on the 1st of
December 1974? But still you can have duplicates. Eventually designers
realised it was impossible to be 100% accurate and so moved on to a
pragmatic solution. You have an "internal" unique signifier created by the
database when one first comes across a person and against which all data
about that person is stored. This, however, leaves the possibility of
duplicate records in a database when a person already in the database is
registered for a second time, so you run regular checks to see if you have
people with very similar records, but maybe slight spelling differences or
dates of birth etc. The algorithms pick up most, but not all of the
duplicates, which the system then merges.

Extrapolating this experience back into philosophical terms, one might argue
that personal identity is private knowledge. Only I know that I am who I am,
you can only surmise on the basis of observation that I am who I am. I can
change most things which identify me as myself. I can change my name, my
nationality, my gender and even my DNA. If I change enough, then the
computer will not pick up the matching duplicate and so I become classified
as a different person to the outside world. Only I know that I am still the
same person, until brain damage takes away my memories and alters my
personality, do I then have a different identity?

This then raises questions about why identity is important, which is the
subject of another thread .....

Bernie

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-bups-dis@purplepancake.com
[mailto:owner-bups-dis@purplepancake.com]On Behalf Of Keith Wilson
Sent: 28 February 2006 09:02
To: James Alexander Cunningham
Cc: BUPS-DIS@bups.org
Subject: Re: counterparts


To reply to this message or start a new topic please email:
BUPS-DIS@bups.org


I totally sympathise with your attitude towards Kripke as I felt exactly
the same way after reading some of his work in my first year. However, on
revisiting the text I have a new found respect for the man and his views
and would highly recommend reading N&N if you get the chance.

Your first point about "I could have been a piece of bow resin" illustrates
that we do have essential properties, at least when we describe ourselves
as an "I". In this case, being some sort of living creature (or possibly a
human being, in which case my original example already went too far).
Kripke gives a similar example with regard to Richard Nixon (p46), who he
says could not have been an inanimate object, and possibly not a non-human
creature (although some might dispute the latter!).

The possibility that people or things could have been called something
different is not a problem for Kripke. The possible world in which you are
called Hector includes you because you have stipulated this in your
description; i.e. it is *you* that is called Hector. Conversely, if your
twin was called James and is identical to the you that inhabits this world
in every way, then he is still not you because you have already specified
that he is your twin. This seems pretty intuitive but contradicts what
David Lewis says about counterparts, a view which Kripke thinks contains
various logical errors (p45) as well as being misguided.

The confusion arises when we try to compare names as they are used in
different possible worlds. The James in this world and the James in the
other world (e.g. your twin) are not necessarily the same person, although
they could be, depending upon how we have set up the specific example. When
you describe the possible world you effectively 'pin' the terms you use in
its description to refer to the same objects across worlds; the rest of the
world can change around it, but that object remains 'the same thing' in
both possible worlds. Conversely, when you say '.... is called X', this
indicates an object that is qualitatively but not numerically identical.
This might qualify as a Lewisian counterpart, but for Kripke is no longer
the same object.

Cheers,
Keith.


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