SRH is essence of contradition!

To have a contradiction there must be self-reference since a contradiction is A & –A and so what ever A is must also be negated in –A… that is some quality of A is referred to in both A and negatively in –A. This is not “self” in the usual existential sense of a “thing” but rather self in the sense of “same”.

When we ask whether the hooded man has the same identity as someone we are asking are they the “same” person. To determine whether they are the same person we must, and can only, compare qualities: have they the same name, do both have beards and blue eyes, the same finger prints, the same DNA.

But all this is not sufficient the key thing to establish is that they are never in two places at the same time. It is a joke that because you never see two people together they must be the same person… I believed that for John Sergeant and Jo Brand until they appeared on the same game show. So we can only prove that someone has an identical genetic twins when we have them both in the same room together at the same time. This seems to be the “essence” of identity: the limitation of objects that they can only occupy one space and time.

Yet I use the word “essence”, and we speak of the “same” space and time. Ex: x is at home at 12am GMT on 25th Dec 1850. The location and time-of-location of x are predicates that we apply to the object x, they are things to be said “of” x but they are not x themselves. The idea of “x” as an existing thing necessarily lies outside the realm of description and predication because this is the only way B.Russell can avoid contradiction. If we allow existence as a predicate then we can talk about those things which don’t exist!

I = (x) x does not exist.

Now this creates a set, I, of all those things which don’t exist. So lets take unicorns. Unicorns don’t exist so they belong to the set I. But how can something that doesn’t exist have membership of a set?

Having hermetically excluded all existing things from predication we are safe, but at a cost there is no way to speak about existence: it is a normative assumption of language, that is we use it when we do predicate logic, and we use it when we communicate but only implicitly; a rule of the game.

Thus one wonders whether “existence” is any more than just a rule of the game. Certainly the idea that our “hooded man” is an “existing” individual, separate from others in some fundamentally true way that we can only ever guess at with more and more evidence, is just a vain hope, a faith in the fundamental reality of the world. Let us hope that physics doesn’t continue its path of upsetting this faith much more since little remains already.

So returning to the top, the idea of reference referring to the same existences may be only a rule of the game, in reality any supposed identity is always, and only ever, based upon evidence and predicates of the entities under scrutiny. We have no magical way of ever pulling away the veil of phenomena to look at the underlying things to decide which is which, and what is what, and who is who. Hesperus and Phospheros once thought to be morning and evening stars with evidence and a new model of the skies became the same entity: I wonder what they thought of this after all those years apart ;-)

Maybe then reference is always between predicates and when these predicates are the same then we presume “real” identity or non-identity… until things change and we decide they are different or the same.