Tags / 6 quotes from 1 source
#vagueness
The Ego Trick (baggini, Julian)
Custard cannot be nailed to a wall
‘But is a blurred concept a concept at all?’ he imagined them objecting. ‘Is an indistinct photograph a picture of a person at all?’ he answered. ‘Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn’t the indistinct one often exactly what we…
The false precision of personal identity theory
The philosophy of personal identity is, unfortunately, a prime example of this. It is fatally flawed by its goal of stating the strict logical conditions for the persistence of a person over time. Because this is how the whole debate is framed, it tends to underestimate the…
Person is not a robust sortal
I’m happy to bite both Noonan’s bullets. In fact, I chew them with relish. ‘Person’ is not best thought of as a robust sortal concept and so ‘personal identity’ is strictly speaking non-existent. The idea that ‘person’ is not a sortal concept may seem bizarre. How could we…
Pragmatic identity and counting sex
The distinction I am making here is between strict logical identity and what we might call pragmatic identity. There are numerous examples of words and concepts that are not strict sortals yet which can usually be used as though they were. Take the act of ‘having sex’. I’m…
Rigorous without being strict
This claim is only disturbing if you think ‘strict’ is the same as ‘rigorous’. We don’t have to lapse into obfuscatory fog just because we reject the possibility of logical rigidity. It goes back to the idea that we can be as precise as possible without being totally precise.
The self is like a cloud
Perhaps the simplest analogy is with a cloud. From a distance it looks like an object with fairly clear edges, but the closer you get to it, the more indistinct it becomes. Get really close and you can see it’s just a collection of water droplets.