[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: Identity
* Miles Sabin | | The trouble with an idea of identity that ties it up with being able | to tell whether two descriptions pick out the same or different | things is that it has the unfortunate effect of relativising the | idea to differing abilities to pick out differences. This approach can be taken pretty far. For example, there are philosophical schools (notably the Zen and Buddhist ones) that hold that a division of the world into discrete 'things' is undesirable and thus kills the very concept of identity stone dead. And if you start to look closely at it there is a lot to be said for this way of thinking. However, this discussion seems mainly to have been founded on Kant and his view that we are subjects receiving impressions of the world and on the basis on those impressions deciding that the world is composed of objects with identity. | Lois Lane belives that Superman isn't the same person as Clark | Kent. Clark Kent presumably believes otherwise. Which one of those | two beliefs is true? Within that fictional universe, two main approaches seem useful: a) Settle for some function that can be applied to sensory data to infer from a continuous stream of such data the existence and state of various discrete chunks that we can then label with identifiers. In the example one such definition could be the naive one that we use in every-day life to identify people we know. Under this definition Clark Kent and Superman are the identifiers of two distinct people to everyone except the one person who knows that these two are in fact one person and that his correct identifier is Kal-El. This is not a very desirable approach, since all observers will not necessarily agree on the identity of each object. b) Alternatively, one can postulate that behind the stream of sensory data we receive there is in fact a world consisting of discrete chunks and that these chunks have as one of their properties identifiers that hopefully are unique. In the example this would be as if we used social security number[1] to identify people. Clark Kent would readily give his, but unless you could entice Superman to give his SSN you would never be able to discover that these two are in fact (under this definition) one and the same person. And in some cases, such as in the case of the illegal alien who washes Kent's office, the person has no SSN at all. And so this approach turns out to be slightly more desirable, provided that everyone is willing to play along. (Where everyone includes Superman, illegal aliens and the government.) And for those who are not willing to play along it seems to me that approach (a) can be used as a fallback strategy. Now, if you substitute user-agent for person, HTTP response for sensory data and resource for chunk, then as far as I can tell (a) is the situation we have on the web today, and (b) is the one Paul Prescod proposed with his HTTP-ID HTTP header. None of these approaches really settle the question of identity one way or the other, but rather do as we do in everyday life: postulate that there is an underlying identity and proceed with every-day life with that as an article of faith. The Buddhists would claim that this leads to eternal suffering, and the Kantians would claim that this is the best possible approach. Not being really into the Buddhist way of seeing things I think I'll opt for the latter approach. --Lars M. [1] Or whatever your national equivalent is. Personnummer, in my case. xml-dev: A list for W3C XML Developers. To post, mailto:xml-dev@i... Archived as: http://www.lists.ic.ac.uk/hypermail/xml-dev/ and on CD-ROM/ISBN 981-02-3594-1 To (un)subscribe, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; (un)subscribe xml-dev To subscribe to the digests, mailto:majordomo@i... the following message; subscribe xml-dev-digest List coordinator, Henry Rzepa (mailto:rzepa@i...)
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