Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation

 

Statues, Lumps, and Identity Public Deposited

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https://scholar.colorado.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/jd472w71f
Abstract
  • In his 1975 article “Contingent Identity,” Allan Gibbard purportedly shows that not all identity statements containing proper names are necessarily true. The thrust of his argument comes from a clever statue-and-lump case. Specifically, Gibbard claims that two proper names that refer to identical objects could have referred to distinct objects. In my thesis I argue that the postulation of contingent identity immediately presents one with a contradiction—specifically, one where identity statements containing proper names are both necessarily true (i.e. true in all possible worlds) and yet also fail to be true in some possible world W. Furthermore, I argue that the proponent of contingent identity conflates an object with the properties used to fix the reference of a designator of the object. Ultimately, I show that upholding a Kripkean notion of naming and reference allows one to uphold the necessity of identity in light of Gibbard’s statue-and-lump case.
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  • 2012
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  • 2019-11-17
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