And the conclusion: that S is 1 metre long is an a priori, contingent truth. — Banno
We have contradictory customs. — frank
We write novels, and we try cases, and different rules apply, but as long as we keep our customs separate, and keep fiction out of the courtroom, there is no contradiction. — unenlightened
Can anyone provide an example of a possible world or counterfactual situation that is not stipulated? — Banno
if you stipulated that 2+2=5 — Banno
So what's the problem?
Here's how I read it. Some folk say that there is a problem in identifying individuals in other possible worlds. Kripke points out that other possible worlds are specified by our musings... and hence that there is no problem with such a grand title as "transworld identification". — Banno
Can anyone provide an example of a possible world or counterfactual situation that is not stipulated?
— Banno
Not me... — unenlightened
But as I have never been to the US, it is possible that The Man in the High Castle is substantially true, and all this stuff about presidents is fake news. Or is it? — unenlightened
If we're just saying that in counterfactual (or "possible worlds") talk, we can refer to things so that they're "the same x" as they are in the actual world, barring counterfactual modifications we make to them, and to some extent that's necessary to make sense of counterfactual talk at all, that shouldn't take a whole book/series of lectures to note. — Terrapin Station
Perhaps we should move on. — Wallows
You say you haven't understood the notion of identity criterion, on the rejection of which the remainder of the book is based, and although I found it interesting to revisit, I have several other books I ought be reading. — Banno
So : the question of transworld identification makes some sense, in terms of asking about the identity of an object via questions about its component parts. But these parts are not qualities, and it is not an object resembling the given one which is in question. Theorists have often said that we identify objects across possible worlds as objects resembling the given one in the most important respects. On the contrary, Nixon, had he decided to act otherwise, might have avoided politics like the plague, though privately harboring radical opinions. Most important, even when we can replace questions about an object by questions about its parts, we need not do so. We can refer to the object and ask what might have happened to it. So, we do not begin with worlds (which are supposed somehow to be real, and whose qualities, but not whose objects, are perceptible to us), and then ask about criteria of transworld identification; on the contrary, we begin with the objects, which we have, and can identify, in the actual world. We can then ask whether certain things might have been true of the objects. — Kripke pg. 53
When we think of Nixon losing an election, we must be thinking of a Nixon who ran in the first place, as opposed to a NIxon who left the US to become a Tibetan monk when he was 17. This possible world must also be one in which the sun didn't go supernova 10,000 years ago.
The list of things that had to be just so for there to be a Nixon who ran for president of the USA would appear to be massive and extending backward to the beginning of the universe. Therefore, I agree it's a simple stipulation.I don't agree that any of the profound philosophical questions associated with the stipulation have been answered by Kripke. — frank
Is Frank addressing the same thing? — Banno
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