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Leibniz's Principle of The Identity of Indiscernibles: A False Principle

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 April 2022

Alberto Cortes
Alberto Cortes*
Affiliation:
Texas Tech University
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Abstract

In considering the possibility that the fundamental particles of matter might violate Leibniz's Principle, one is confronted with logical proofs that the Principle is a Theorem of Logic. This paper shows that the proof of that theorem is not universal enough to encompass entities that might not be unique, and also strongly suggests that photons, for example, do violate Leibniz's Principle. It also shows that the existence of non-individuals would imply the breakdown of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy of Science , Volume 43 , Issue 4 , December 1976 , pp. 491 - 505
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by the Philosophy of Science Association

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Footnotes

†

I would like to thank Drs. Charles Daniels, James Fetzer and Kenneth Ketner for very useful criticisms of earlier versions of this paper; also I would like to thank very particularly Dr. Wesley Salmon, who suggested a very fruitful change of strategy in the paper, and the anonymous referee whose criticisms of the semi-final version of this paper were extremely valuable for its clarification. I presented some of the basic ideas of this paper for the first time in a talk to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science at Indiana University in the Fall of 1970. They were later incorporated into my dissertation, [2]. Also, some of these ideas were presented in a paper read at the annual meeting of the New Mexico-West Texas Philosophical Society at Alburquerque, New Mexico in April, 1975.

References

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