Identity and quantification

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• 作者：Kai F. Wehmeier
• 关键词：Identity ; Quantification ; Variables ; Sameness ; Quine
• 刊名：Philosophical Studies
• 出版年：2017
• 出版时间：March 2017
• 年：2017
• 卷：174
• 期：3
• 页码：759-770
• 全文大小：
• 刊物类别：Humanities, Social Sciences and Law
• 刊物主题：Philosophy, general; Epistemology; Philosophy of Mind; Ethics; Metaphysics; Philosophy of Language;
• 出版者：Springer Netherlands
• ISSN：1573-0883
• 卷排序：174

文摘

It is a philosophical commonplace that quantification involves, invokes, or presupposes, the relation of identity. There seem to be two major sources for this belief: (1) the conviction that identity is implicated in the phenomenon of bound variable recurrence within the scope of a quantifier; (2) memories of Quine’s insistence that quantification requires absolute identity for the values of variables. With respect to (1), I show that the only extant argument for a dependence of variable recurrence on identity, due to John Hawthorne, fails. I further show that the function of variable recurrence is not subsumed under that of identity, so that a dependence of the former on the latter, if any, would have to be of a rather indirect nature. With respect to (2), I argue that the relevant passage in Quine fails to establish a connection between quantification and the identity relation, and indeed wasn’t intended by Quine to do so.