Statues and Lumps: A Strange Coincidence?

This paper attacks various arguments for the impossibility of coinciding objects. Distinguishing a temporally relative from an absolute sense of ‘the same’, we see that the intuition, ‘this is only one thing’, and the dictum, ‘two things cannot occupy the same place at the same time’, are individuating things at a time rather than absolutely and are therefore compatible with coincidence. Burke and Heller claim that if objects coincide, there would be no explanation of how objects that are qualitatively the same can belong to different sorts. But we can explain an object’s sort by appealing to its properties at other times and other worlds. Burke’s temporal supervenience argument rides on a confused notion of ‘identity across time’ and ‘the statue at t’. Heller’s modal supervenience argument infers that an object’s non-modal properties must determine its modal properties since the modal is grounded in the modal. Popular accounts of modality show that this inference is unwarranted. Last week Matthew combined rare soils to create a large lump of clay. He named the lump of clay ‘Clayton’. Arthur found the clay on the workbench last night and shaped it into a beautiful statue of a winged woman. He named the statue ‘Angel’ and set it on the mantle, where it now sits. Because clay statues sell so poorly, three days from now Arthur will take a bit of clay from the statue, replace it by a bit of lead of the same size, and continue the process for a few hours until the clay making up Angel is entirely replaced by lead, finally throwing the clay into the garbage bin. In the study of material constitution, there is a great divide between those who think that multiple objects can occupy the same place at the same time, call them pluralists, and those who think such spatial coincidence is impossible, call them monists.1 The argument for pluralism is simple. The lump of clay sat on the workbench last night but the statue did not. The statue could not survive flattening, but the lump could. Because the statue and the lump of clay have different temporal and modal properties, by Leibniz’s Law we conclude that the statue and the lump of clay are not identical. My aim is to show that the most influential arguments for monism fail, but I begin with some semantics. The Semantics of ‘The Same’ My non-philosopher informants tell me that there is one thing on the mantle, that the lump of clay is the statue, that they are the same thing. Of course, they admit that after the clay is replaced by lead, and the lump of clay sits in the garbage dumpster while the statue still sits on the mantle, then the statue and the lump of clay will be two different objects. Crucially, though, they do not revise their judgment of present sameness in light of their judgment of future difference. Thus, when they say they are ‘the same’ they are not neglecting the fact that the two differ temporally. Similar speaker intuitions occur with cases of fission. Imagine that Al splits like an amoeba to become Cal and Hal. The untutored claim is that there was only one person before the 1 The terminology is Kit Fine’s (in conversation).