Occasional Identity or Occasional Reference ?

André Gallois argues that individuals that undergo fission are on some occasions identical, but on others distinct . occasional identity however, is metaphysically costly . i argue that we can get all the benefits of occasional identity without the metaphysical costs . on the proposed account, the names of ordinary material objects refer indeterminately to stages that belong to reference classes determined by the context of utterance or temporal adverbs . in addition, temporal markers indicating the perspective from which we count objects and assign properties to them determine how many count and what is true of them . So, as Gallois holds, the truth value of claims about what is true at a time may change over time and, where fission or fusion occur, does change . the current account, however, secures this result without commitment to occasional identity: reference, predication and counting are “occasional”; identity is not . KEyWoRDS: Fission, identity, occasional identity, persistence, reference, survival . André Gallois (1999) argues that individuals that undergo fission are on some occasions identical but at others distinct . However, while occasional identity makes sense of fission cases it is metaphysically costly . i argue that we can get all the benefits of occasional identity without the metaphysical costs: reference, predication and counting are “occasional”; identity is not .