Re: SUO: On Clay and Vase
>Dear John,
>
> > The main thing that I object to in Nicola's position is his
> > interpretation of identity and his claim that the statue
> > and the clay are two different things. That is not something
> > that either scientists or the proverbial T. C. Mits would say.
>
>Well actually in the usual case the piece of clay and the vase are two
>different objects under a 4D view. This is because normally, the vase is
>made from a single piece of clay. Thus the spatio-temporal extent of the
>piece of clay is different from the spatio-temporal extent of the vase
>(except when both come into existance and cease to exist at the same time).
>So normally the vase is a sub-state of the piece of clay. Whilst the piece
>of clay is also the vase the two are of course co-incident.
>
>I'm sure you know this, but others may not.
Yes. And if we consider things which consist(in part) of liquids,
things get even more complicated. For example, Lac Leman is
considered to be an object in most accounts of geography and by the
people who live on its shores. But one can also view it as simply a
wide part of the Rhône (which flows in at one end of the Lac and out
at the other). There are two ways to cut up the space-time history of
the lake: one treats it as geographically fixed, with water flowing
through it; the other identifies particular mereological sums of H2O
molecules (and assorted detrius, dissolved gases, etc.) which are
moving through space, ie sloping in space-time. These different kinds
of history can only coincide for a moment. They are like two
different spatiotemporal textures drawn at an angle to each other,
each set of lines covering the entire space, but never parallel.
(Either of them might qualify as a continuant, by the way; but they
couldn't both be continuants at the same, er, time.) In order to
think about the lake with the proficiency of an ordinary Swiss bloke
(and probably with that of ordinary Swiss fish, for that matter) one
needs to be able to reason with both kinds of history; and if these
are both 'things', then they are things that coincide only for a
moment anywhere.
Lac Leman is easy, by the way. There is persuasive evidence that
kids' thinking gets to that stage when they are about 4 years old. If
you want to think about what goes on inside an car engine or inside a
Xerox machine, you need to consider 'things' like histories of
pressure gradients, which have even more elusive and transient ways
of overlapping with other things in spacetime. It seems odd to say
that a pressure gradient *is* the oil.
Pat Hayes
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