{"id":196,"date":"2018-12-23T18:40:20","date_gmt":"2018-12-23T18:40:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/?p=196"},"modified":"2018-12-23T18:41:52","modified_gmt":"2018-12-23T18:41:52","slug":"196","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/23\/196\/","title":{"rendered":"Kinds, Individuals and Instances"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><b>Anon: <\/b><i>I got to thinking, as I pinched up a word and moved it to another place in the sentence: was it the same token?\u00a0 If I cut an apostrophe and paste it somewhere else, is there ANY coherent sense in which it is the same apostrophe?\u00a0 Heck, if I insert a few words in a document, so that all the succeeding ones have to &#8220;shift&#8221; down, are the &#8220;shifted&#8221; ones in any sense the same?\u00a0 If I do nothing at all but watch as the computer continually redraws the words in front of me, isn&#8217;t there something really, really Heraclitean about visibles on a computer screen?\u00a0 Of course just about everything like that, on a much slower scale; but this is unnerving.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure whether you are wondering about recurrence in general, or just about token-identity vs type-identity.<\/p>\n<p>It seems to me that epistemically (for Borges\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.bridgewater.edu\/~atrupe\/GEC101\/Funes.html\">Funes-the-Memorious<\/a> reasons), and ontically (for thermodynamic reasons), no two real-time events &#8212; hence, a fortiori, no two objects figuring in those events &#8212; are identical:\u00a0 (&#8220;<i>are<\/i> identical&#8221; is already a misnomer: a thing can only be identical with itself, and even that only instantaneously). If there is a delta-T&#8211; change in time &#8212; then there is, a fortiori, a change, and hence non-identity. (At time T I am me-at-time-T\u00a0and at time T+1 I am me-at-time-T+1: One could make the same argument about the &#8220;same&#8221; object at different points in space, but time has already done the trick, as the same object cannot be simultaneously at two different points in space &#8212; only different parts of the same object can be&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Anon: I got to thinking, as I pinched up a word and moved it to another place in the sentence: was it the same token?\u00a0 If I cut an apostrophe and paste it somewhere else, is there ANY coherent sense in which it is the same apostrophe?\u00a0 Heck, if I insert a few words in &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/2018\/12\/23\/196\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;Kinds, Individuals and Instances&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3074,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3074"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":199,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196\/revisions\/199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/generic.wordpress.soton.ac.uk\/skywritings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}