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Chapter 10 - Grasping Sameness

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2009

Ruth Garrett Millikan
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Affiliation:
University of Connecticut
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Summary

INTRODUCTION: IMAGES OF IDENTITY

In Subject and Predicate in Logic and Grammar, Strawson (1974) offers “a picture or model” of what happens when a man learns that two things formerly thought to be separate are in fact one and the same. “We are to picture a [knowledge] map, as it were” on which all those individuals the man knows of are represented by dots, and the predicates the man knows to apply to each are written in lines emanating from these dots or, if the predicate is relational, lines joining two dots.

Now when [the man] receives what is for him new information … he incorporates [this] by … making an alteration on his knowledge map [for example,] he draws a further line between two dots. But when it is an identity statement containing two names from which he receives new information, he adds no further lines. He has at least enough lines already; at least enough lines and certainly one too many dots. So what he does is to eliminate one dot of the two, at the same time transferring to the remaining one … all those lines and names which attach to the eliminated dot. (Strawson 1974, pp. 54–5.)

On Strawson's picture, the identity of a particular is represented in the mind by the identity of another particular. So long as you haven't made any mistakes, everything you know about your mother is attached to the same particular mental representation of your mother, to the same token.

Type
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On Clear and Confused Ideas
An Essay about Substance Concepts
 , pp. 136 - 146
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2000

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  • Grasping Sameness
  • Ruth Garrett Millikan, University of Connecticut
  • Book: On Clear and Confused Ideas
  • Online publication: 02 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613296.011
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  • Grasping Sameness
  • Ruth Garrett Millikan, University of Connecticut
  • Book: On Clear and Confused Ideas
  • Online publication: 02 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613296.011
Available formats
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  • Grasping Sameness
  • Ruth Garrett Millikan, University of Connecticut
  • Book: On Clear and Confused Ideas
  • Online publication: 02 December 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511613296.011
Available formats
×