[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] RE: Identity
Lars Marius Garshol wrote, > [snipped out of order] > Miles Sabin wrote, > > But this isn't an issue about *identity*, it's an > > issue about *identification*. > > You lost me here. What is the distinction between > those two terms to you? I'll deal with this first, because I think it'll tidy up some of the misunderstandings that've been flying around in this thread. When John Cowan (apologies in advance if I'm misrepresenting him) and I have been talking about 'identity' we've been talking about a *relation*: the = of logic and mathematics, or the == of various programming languages. This is very different from the way the term is often used in informal talk, where it's often used to pick out an *object* (in a very broad sense of object). A fairly venerable term for this second sort of usage is 'essence'. Essences haven't been in very good odour recently (Quine did a fairly good job of killing them off back in the 60's). Still, like most things philosophical, it's swings and roundabouts, and they're coming back into fashion. OK, so I take identity to be a relation. What sort of relation? Pretty much a primitive and undefinable one: everything stands in the identity relation to itself, and only to itself, and, err ... that's it. Identification is a different kettle of fish altogether. It's about how you come to know that the thing picked out by one description is identical to the thing picked out by another. Unlike identity, which just does it's thing, identification is problematic, because it requires an identifying agent of some sort, and most identifying agents are fallible. > You're right that I'm arguing about what counts as > exactly one object, but you're wrong that this has > nothing to do with identity. In fact, resolving that > issue is in fact the first step in assigning identity, > because it gives you something to assign identity to. OK, I think that if you replace 'identity' with 'essence' or 'gestalt' then we're probably in synch. Trouble is, I think your chances of getting anywhere with defining the essence of a web-site are likely to be very slim indeed. > > The kinds of things which are hard are the ones > > which can split, fuse, pop into and out of > > existence, and which can persist across a rapid > > turnover of constituents. Social institutions are > > one example of this sort of thing. Web-sites, even > > individual pages, look suspiciously like being > > another. > > These are difficult, I agree, but they're by no means > the only cases. Err ... but surely these are exactly the kind of cases that we're talking about? > [snip 2 URLs] > > I've no idea. And I'm fairly sure that there's no > > general answer to this sort of question. > > Do you agree that this means a failure to provide a > good chopping mechanism for the web? I agree that we haven't got one. I doubt that we ever will. Cheers, Miles -- Miles Sabin Cromwell Media Internet Systems Architect 5/6 Glenthorne Mews +44 (0)181 410 2230 London, W6 0LJ msabin@c... England 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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