On 7/19/2016 12:28 AM, Bruce wrote:
Abandoning the transitivity of identity is difficult in general because it is precisely that transitivity that gives us a reliable notion of the continuity of personhood through time. The things that might seem to violate transitivity in duplication (copies in separate locations, etc, that is, non-psychological differences), also would give violations of transitivity relating copies of the same person at different times and places. We need a principled account of exactly what leads to the violation of transitivity in one case and not in the other.
I think this is looking at the problem the wrong way; it's trying to fit the world to a word. It's not transitivity that gives us a reliable notion of the continuity of personhood. We already had the notion of continuity and we invented the concept of transitivity (actually in other contexts) and applied it to personhood. There's no reason we should not recognize personhood as having several empirical bases: memories, similarity of bodies, continuity of location,... Personhood is not some logical attribute that must have a sharp mathematical definition, as I tried to illustrate by the problem of Eve.
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