Assertion: identity | /r/HasProperty | indeterminate
Facets:
value: in some cases
type: TEMPORAL
value: categorically
type: TEMPORAL
Source sentences:
text: Note that, should personal identity be indeterminate, we might still be able to give a criterion of personal identity, even though such a criterion would then fall short of giving full necessary and sufficient conditions, since in some imaginary case it does not apply.
text: Some would say that that the identity stated by C is vague or indeterminate.
text: (b) One could deny premise 2 instead, arguing that if personal identity is indeterminate, then our preferred criterion of personal identity does not have to deliver verdicts in all thought-experimental scenarios.
text: Alleged conclusion: personal identity is indeterminate.
text: The other problem is that even if personal identity is indeterminate, the claim cannot by itself establish one criterion over others: in order to do so, it would have to exclude those thought experiments that challenge opposing criteria while leaving untouched those that supposedly establish the preferred criterion.
text: Consequently, unless one holds that personal identity is categorically indeterminate whenever the physiological and psychological features of a human being come apart, appeal to indeterminacy cannot establish the rejection of the Big Assumption in such a way as to avoid the Paradox’s conclusion.
text: We must first note that Parfit believes (i) that our persistence consists in physical and/or psychological continuity; (ii) that personal identity is indeterminate in some cases, that is, that sometimes there is no right-or-wrong answer to the question of whether somebody has ceased to exist in the course of a certain adventure (see 3.b.); (iii) that what prudentially matters in survival is psychological continuity; (iv) that personal identity relations must respect the remaining formal properties of identity.
text: What does it mean to say that an identity is vague or indeterminate?
text: If C does lack a determinate truth value, is that enough to ensure that the identity of the clubs referred to by C is indeterminate?
text: Consequently, the question does in fact have an answer, and the claim that identity is indeterminate is self-contradictory.
text: This conclusion is strengthened, in the case of personal identity, by the widely shared intuition that even if the identity of some objects might be indeterminate, this could not be true of the identity of persons: one cannot, it seems, be a bit dead and a bit alive in the same way in which one cannot be a bit pregnant.