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Haeccities and the triviality of the identity of indiscernibles.

The Identity of Indiscernibles is the principle that objects cannot differ only numerically. It is widely held that one interpretation of this principle is trivially true: the claim that objects that bear all of the same properties are identical. This triviality ostensibly arises from haecceities (p...

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Published in:Synthese Vol. 205; no. 3; pp. 1 - 23
Main Author: Elgin, Samuel Z.
Format: Article
Published: Springer Nature Mar2025
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        au: Elgin, Samuel Z.
        affil: https://ror.org/05t99sp05 University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, 92101, La Jolla, CA, USA
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      ab: The Identity of Indiscernibles is the principle that objects cannot differ only numerically. It is widely held that one interpretation of this principle is trivially true: the claim that objects that bear all of the same properties are identical. This triviality ostensibly arises from haecceities (properties like is identical to a). I argue that this is not the case; we do not trivialize the Identity of Indiscernibles with haecceities, because it is impossible to express the haecceities of indiscernible objects. I then argue that this inexpressibility generalizes to all of their trivializing properties. Whether the Identity of Indiscernibles is trivially true ultimately turns on whether we can quantify over properties that we cannot express.
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    language: English
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