Date of Award
2016
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
M.A. in Philosophy
Department
Philosophy and Religion
First Advisor
Donovan Wishon
Second Advisor
Robert Barnard
Third Advisor
Timothy P. Yenter
Relational Format
dissertation/thesis
Abstract
One comtheory of persistence is that things move through time as wholly present entities, moving from time to time as a complete unit. This theory, the endurance theory, has come under challenge by various authors, and this paper will defend the view from one such objection. Katherine Hawley argues that the endurance theory fails to account for vague persistence on the grounds that endurance cannot account for vagueness semantically. I will show that this claim is based on an assumption of classical logic and that by rejecting this assumption in favor of a non-classical logic the objection is rendered mute. By revising our understanding of the identity relation to function on a continuum scale we can understand persistence as a scalar function that can be labeled as true false or any value in between. This reinterpretation of the identity relation will allow an endurance theorist to account for vague persistence semantically and thereby reject the objection from Hawley.
Recommended Citation
Waite, Seth, "A Non-Classical Solution To Vague Persistence" (2016). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1107.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1107