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On the Alleged Incompleteness of Certain Identity Claims1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Jack Nelson
Jack Nelson*
Affiliation:
Temple University
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Extract

In Mental Acts Professor Peter Geach asserts that “‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term … ” In Reference and Generality Geach interjects the following note: “I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether x and y are ‘the same’, or whether x remains ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term ‘the same F’.” Here, as in Mental Acts, he goes on to say that not any general term will serve to complete ‘the same’ constructions; only substantival terms will suffice for this purpose. Finally, in his article, “ldentity,” Geach asserts that “When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this … is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance—or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought.” (We should not, incidently, conclude from this last remark that Geach thinks all and only count nouns are substantival terms.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Philosophy , Volume 3 , Issue 1 , September 1973 , pp. 105 - 113
Copyright
Copyright © The Authors 1973

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Footnotes

1

An earlier version of this paper was read at The Western Division Meetings of The American Philosophical Association, May 6,1971.

References

2 Geach, Peter Thomas Mental Acts (New York: Humanities Press, 1957), p. 69.Google Scholar

3 Geach, Reference and Generality (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962, p. 39.Google Scholar

4 Geach, “Identity,” Review of Metaphysics, XXI (1967), p. 31.Google Scholar

5 Geach, “A Reply,” The Review of Metaphysics, XXII (1969), p. 596.Google Scholar

6 Geach, Mental Acts, p. 69.

7 Perry, John “The Same F,” The Philosophical Review; LXXIX (1970), pp. 181–200.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

8 Nelson, Jack “Relative Identity,” Nous, IV (1970), pp. 241–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

9 Geach, “Identity,” p. 10.

10 Nelson, “Relative Identity,” p. 254.

11 Wiggins, David “On Being in the Same Place at the Same Time,” The Philosophical Review, LXXVII (1968), pp. 90–95.Google Scholar

12 Sanford, David “Locke, Leibniz, and Wiggins on Being in the Same Place at the Same Time,” The Philosophical Review, LXXIX (1970), pp. 75–83.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

13 Geach, Reference and Generality, p. 39.

14 Geach, Reference and Generality, pp. 43–45.

15 A crucial difference between ‘John is thin and tall’ and ‘John is identical with Harry’ should here be made explicit. Even after the denotation of ‘John’ has been fixed the truth conditions of ‘John is thin and tall’ remain unclear, for john may be both a pygmy and a basketball player. In other words the predicate x (x is tall) is genuinely semantically incomplete. But we do fix the truth conditions of ‘John is identical with Harry’ by fixing the denotations of ‘John’ and of ‘Harry’. Whatever kinds of things john and Harry may be, they cannot be identical qua one of those kinds but not qua another.

16 Geach, Reference and Generality, pp. 39–40.

17 Geach, Reference and Generality, pp. 38–40.