The Concept of Identity

How do we know when two things are the same thing? This question seems uselessly abstract until we consider the fact that our knowledge is organized around sameness. And if we do not know what we mean when we say two things are the same, it is not possible to develop or acquire knowledge. When we say that two things are both games, we are saying they have the same essence or arché, which, in turn, means certain things should be true about both of them. To push this further, all things called games should have the same essence and certain things should be true about all of them. Further, all games should be related in a consistent manner to other concepts such as enjoyment, pleasure or growth. This is how we organize our knowledge and organizing our knowledge around essences leads to greater intellectual economy.

The concept of identity is the metaphysical problem that we encounter when we attempt to establish sameness. There are, in fact, two quite different varieties of sameness: sameness of a thing over time and sameness of two distinct things. The first, sometimes called the persistence of identity, addresses the problems that arise when I say that I am the same person who graduated from college, lo so many years ago, even though that person was decades younger, much less wiser, and very different in so many ways. The second, usually called the problem of universals, addresses the problems that arise when we group things into categories. Where do those categories come from? With no intention of minimizing the first, we are going to consider the second over the next few posts. There are two reasons for this. First, we need to know what we mean by the term 'games' if we are going to study them seriously. And, second, 'games' have an important role in the development of our understanding of universals.