The Great Western Railway
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The Great Western Railway Harold W. Noonan 1 Received: 16 January 2020 / Revised: 16 June 2020 / Accepted: 24 August 2020 # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract In On The Plurality of Worlds Lewis presents the case of the Great Western Railway as a candidate counter-example, along with the usual suspects, to the thesis that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. Typically, pluralists or many-thingers, i.e., those who reject the thesis, point to modal or historical or aesthetic differences to justify their judgement of non-identity. Lewis’s aim to is to show the inadequacy of this justification, at least as regards modal differences, by considering a case in which it clearly fails, in which the judgement of non-identity so based is incredible, and hence to make it evident that in all such cases the appeal to modal differences is insufficient. What makes the case of the Great Western Railway special is that it is a purely spatial example, as Lewis emphasises. In what follows I set out the example and try to make it clear that, as Lewis says, for this reason a judgement of non-identity based on an appeal to modal differences is incredible. Then I give another example, easier to understand, I think, which makes the same point, inspired by Russell’s famous joke about the irate yacht owner. Keywords The great Western railway . Lewis, modality . Identity . Inconstancy
In On The Plurality of Worlds (1986: 248 ff.) Lewis presents the case of the Great Western Railway as a candidate counter-example, along with the usual suspects, the statue and the clay, Tib and Tibbles and so on, to the thesis that two things cannot be in the same place at the same time. Typically pluralists or many-thingers, i.e., those who reject the thesis, point to modal or historical or aesthetic differences to justify their judgement of non-identity. Lewis’s aim to is to show the inadequacy of this justification, at least as regards modal differences, by considering a case in which it clearly fails, in which the judgement of non-identity so based is incredible, and hence to make it evident that in all such cases the appeal to modal differences is insufficient. What makes the case of the Great Western Railway special, and so convincingly not a case of * Harold W. Noonan [email protected]
1
Department of Philosophy, University of Nottingham, Nottingham NG72RD, UK
Philosophia
two things in the same place at the same time differing solely in modal respects, is that it is a purely spatial example, as Lewis emphasises, in which the ground for a judgement of non-identity can only be a claimed modal difference (unlike merely temporary coincidence cases, like that of Tib and Tibbles), but in which the modal difference appealed to cannot be a difference in capacities for change over time (as in cases like the permanently coincident statue and clay, which pluralists claim to be nonidentical because the clay could have been rolled into a ball and not destroyed, whereas the ball could not have survived that change). But there has been
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