TRANSCENDENTAL INDIVIDUALITY
Principles of individuality which invoke something over and above some set of properties of an entity are examples of what Post has called 'Transcendental Individuality' (TI). 24 As originally introduced, this notion is somewhat ambiguous. The example given was that of losing one's umbrella and being faced in the lost property office by a number of umbrellas which, crucially, are indistinguishable in the sense already mentioned of possessing their non-spatio-temporal properties in common. Yet, it was insisted, the question 'but which is my umbrella?' still makes sense. Individuality, it was claimed, must lie with something over and above the set of properties in terms of which the umbrellas could be regarded as indistinguishable.
end p.11
Put like this, one candidate for this TI would be the subset of spatio-temporal properties already mentioned. Indeed, we could determine which was our umbrella, at least in principle, by reconstructing the spatio-temporal trajectory of the thing and following it back to us. Obviously such a determination would fail if IA were violated. And again, as we have already said, this view can be found in philosophical reflections on classical physics. We shall call it 'Space-Time Individuality', or STI for short. Of course, such a view immediately invites speculation as to the nature of the individuating spatio-temporal background. On a relational view of space and time, the spatio-temporal locations of physical individuals involve relations with other individuals and a possible circularity develops. 25 This may be broken by invoking a privileged set of continuants by reference to which all other things are individuated. But the nature of this privilege must be spelled out and the danger is that STI collapses into some other account of individuality, such as the one sketched below. Alternatively, the circularity could be broken by adopting a substantivalist view of space and time according to which spatio-temporal properties and relations of physical things are reduced to the properties of space-time points. Of course, this in turn requires some explication of what it is that confers individuality upon the points of space-time themselves. 26
As an alternative to STI, we could take Post's notion to refer to something 'transcending' all the properties of a thing, including the spatio-temporal ones. Historically, various candidates have been proposed for this 'something', including 'haecceity', 'primitive thisness', 'fundamental unity' and 'substance'. Having separated off STI, we shall reserve the abbreviation T I to describe this whole collection of candidates. We accept that this obscures the fundamental differences between them but what is important for our purposes here is the central idea that individuality is conferred by something that goes beyond the properties; the metaphysical nature of that something is of less concern, although it will be touched upon.
This answer to our question (1) must face the problem of describability: if description, in its positive form, involves a listing of attributes, how can we describe that which 'transcends' these attributes? All we can do, it seems, is describe this something in negative terms. Thus, as we have already noted, Locke famously and problematically described his substantial substratum as
end p.12
a "something, we know not what". Empiricist minded philosophers have not taken kindly to such notions and have preferred an answer in terms of (a) above. The status of PII then becomes crucial. 27
Formally we get around (or, some might say, obscure) the describability problem by introducing proper names or labels or variables, x, y, etc. which stand for or designate the individual, with predicates representing properties, as we have in our characterization of PII above. As is well known, how we understand such names or labels is philosophically contentious: running roughshod over the subtleties, the 'Descriptivist' theory insists that proper names are only shorthand for definite descriptions, a view which meshes nicely with response (a) above; the 'Non-Descriptivist' theory argues that proper names simply refer to objects and that naming is not merely a disguised form of describing, a view that might be seen as going hand in hand with TI; and the 'causal' view attempts to marry elements of these by agreeing that names refer to objects but that this reference is initially established via some form of 'baptism' (either descriptive or ostensive) from which a causal chain extends to uses of the name. Again, we shall not enter into the pros and cons of these views here but we will return to these distinctions later.
Having briefly outlined some of the metaphysical issues and touched upon the introduction of names, or labels, we can now consider the question of how we might express the notion of 'non-individuality' in these (formal) terms. The problem is obvious: if this 'transcendental' something or other is literally indescribable, then how are we going to express the lack of it?! A way out of the dilemma is to understand the above notion of 'primitive thisness' in terms of 'self-identity'. Thus Adams takes primitive thisness as ". the property of being identical with a certain individual-not the property that we all share, of being identical with some individual or other, but my property of being identical with me, your property of being identical with you, etc.". 28 Extending this insight, the idea is apparently simple: regarded in haecceistic terms, 'Transcendental Individuality' can be understood as the identity of an object with itself; that is, 'a = a'. We shall then defend the claim that the notion of non-individuality can be captured in the quantum context by formal
end p.13
systems in which self-identity is
not always well defined, so that the reflexive law of identity, namely, 
x
(x = x), is not valid in general.
|
