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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
Upon those who step into the same rivers different and again different waters flow. The waters scatter and gather, come together and flow away, approach and depart.
(Heraclitus, Diels fragments 12, 91, text and translation after Kirk, Cosmic Fragments, Cambridge, 1954, pp. 367–84.)In the state of living creatures, their identity depends not on a mass of the same particles, but on something else. For in them the variation of great parcels of matter alters not the identity: an oak growing from a plant to a great tree and then lopped, is still the same oak; and a colt grown up to a horse, sometimes fat, sometimes lean, is all the while the same horse.
(John Locke, Essay Concerning Human Understanding ii, xxvii, 3.)All constituents of living matter, whether functional or structural, of simple or complex constitution, are in a steady state of rapid flux.
(Rudolf Schoenheimer, The Dynamic State of Body Constituents, Cambridge, Mass., 1942.)PROPOSITION D AND THE RATIONALE OF THE ‘SAME WHAT?’ QUESTION
If identity were sortal-relative and sortal-relative just by reason of the holding of R or the Relativity of Identity, then that would help to support the Sortal Dependency of Individuation or D, as that was given in the Preface and the first pages of Chapter One. For D is a thesis that some champions of R have wanted to see as a kind of obverse of R. The obverse they look for says that, on pain of indefiniteness, every identity statement stands in radical need of an answer to the question same what? But R is false, we have decided.
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