[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Identity
David Brownell, in a message I've unfortunately purged, thinks that identity is a hard concept. Actually, it isn't. What's hard is *determining* identity. It took the human race millennia to determine the identity of the evening star with the morning star (they are identical with each other and with the planet Venus). The labels he calls "extrinsic" are an attempt to bypass this problem. Other difficulties with identity are not truly with identity, but with what counts as an object. Are you identical with yourself ten years ago? At the level of memory, almost certainly; at the level of atoms, no (most of our atoms turn over in 6-12 months; iron is retained for several years). And don't try to dispense with identity, either, or you find you can't even count things. To say "There are five sheep in that field" is to say "There exists a sheep, A, in the field, and ... and there exists a sheep, E, in the field, and A is not identical with B, C, D, or E, and B is not identical ..., and D is not identical with E." We can count sheep (real sheep) only because we have identity criteria for sheep. -- John Cowan cowan@c... e'osai ko sarji la lojban. 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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