Relative Identity and Cardinality

1999 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patricia Blanchette

Peter Geach famously holds that there is no such thing as absolute identity. There are rather, as Geach sees it, a variety of relative identity relations, each essentially connected with a particular monadic predicate. Though we can strictly and meaningfully say that an individual a is the same man as the individual b, or that a is the same statue as b, we cannot, on this view, strictly and meaningfully say that the individual a simply is b.It is difficult to find anything like a persuasive argument for this doctrine in Geach’s work. But one claim made by Geach is that his account of identity is the account most naturally aligned with Frege's widely admired treatment of cardinality. And though this claim of an affinity between Frege's and Geach's doctrines has been challenged, the challenge has been resisted. William Alston and Jonathan Bennett, indeed, go further than Geach to argue that Frege's doctrine implies Geach's.

Author(s):  
William Mosley-Jensen ◽  
Edward Panetta

Health professionals and the public puzzle through new or controversial issues by deploying patterns of reasoning that are found in a variety of social contexts. While particular issues and vocabulary may require field specific training, the patterns of reasoning used by health advocates and authors reflect rhetorical forms found in society at large. The choices made by speakers often impact the types of evidence used in constructing an argument. For scholars interested in issues of policy, attending to the construction of arguments and the dominant cultural modes of reasoning can help expand the understanding of a persuasive argument in a health context. Argumentation scholars have been attentive to the patterns of reasoning for centuries. Deductive and inductive reasoning have been the most widely studied patterns in the disciplines of communication, philosophy, and psychology. The choice of reasoning, from generalization to specific case or from specific case to generalization, is often portrayed as an exclusive one. The classical pattern of deductive reasoning is the syllogism. Since its introduction to the field of communication in 1957, the Toulmin model has been the most impactful device used by critics to map inductive reasoning. Both deductive and inductive modes of argumentative reasoning draw upon implicit, explicit, and affective reasoning. While the traditional study of reasoning focused on the individual choice of a pattern of reasoning to represent a claim, in the last 40 years, there has been increasing attention to social deliberative reasoning in the field of communication. The study of social (public) deliberative reasoning allows argument scholars to trace patterns of argument that explain policy decisions that can, in some cases, exclude some rhetorical voices in public controversies, including matters of health and welfare.


2009 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 108-122
Author(s):  
Massimiliano Carrara ◽  

Relativists maintain that identity is always relative to a general term (RI). According to them, the notion of absolute identity has to be abandoned and replaced by a multiplicity of relative identity relations for which Leibniz’s Law does not hold. For relativists RI is at least as good as the Fregean cardinality thesis (FC), which contends that an ascription of cardinality is always relative to a concept specifying what, in any specific case, counts as a unit. The same train of thought on cardinality and identity is apparent among those – Artifactualists – who take relative identity sentences for artifacts as the norm. The aim of this paper is (i) to criticize the thesis (T1) thatfrom FC it is possible to derive RI, and (ii) to explain why Artifactualists mistakenly believe that RI can be derived from FC. The misunderstanding derives from their assumption that the concept of artifact – like the concept of object – is not a sortal concept.


2016 ◽  
Vol 52 (4) ◽  
pp. 435-449
Author(s):  
H. E. BABER

AbstractI defend a relative identity solution to the identity puzzle posed by the doctrine of the Trinity. It has been argued that relative identity theories which admit absolute identity, such as the account proposed here, do not succeed in saving the doctrine of the Trinity from logical incoherence. I show that this argument fails. Relative identity theories that admit absolute identity are logically conservative, metaphysically innocent, and unproblematic. And, given the account I propose we can, without incurring any logical or metaphysical costs, hold that Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are the same being but not the same trinitarian person.


Author(s):  
C.N. Sun

The present study demonstrates the ultrastructure of the gingival epithelium of the pig tail monkey (Macaca nemestrina). Specimens were taken from lingual and facial gingival surfaces and fixed in Dalton's chrome osmium solution (pH 7.6) for 1 hr, dehydrated, and then embedded in Epon 812.Tonofibrils are variable in number and structure according to the different region or location of the gingival epithelial cells, the main orientation of which is parallel to the long axis of the cells. The cytoplasm of the basal epithelial cells contains a great number of tonofilaments and numerous mitochondria. The basement membrane is 300 to 400 A thick. In the cells of stratum spinosum, the tonofibrils are densely packed and increased in number (fig. 1 and 3). They seem to take on a somewhat concentric arrangement around the nucleus. The filaments may occur scattered as thin fibrils in the cytoplasm or they may be arranged in bundles of different thickness. The filaments have a diameter about 50 A. In the stratum granulosum, the cells gradually become flatted, the tonofibrils are usually thin, and the individual tonofilaments are clearly distinguishable (fig. 2). The mitochondria and endoplasmic reticulum are seldom seen in these superficial cell layers.


Author(s):  
Anthony J. Godfrey

Aldehyde-fixed chick retina was embedded in a water-containing resin of glutaraldehyde and urea, without dehydration. The loss of lipids and other soluble tissue components, which is severe in routine methods involving dehydration, was thereby minimized. Osmium tetroxide post-fixation was not used, lessening the amount of protein denaturation which occurred. Ultrathin sections were stained with 1, uranyl acetate and lead citrate, 2, silicotungstic acid, or 3, osmium vapor, prior to electron microscope examination of visual cell outer segment ultrastructure, at magnifications up to 800,000.Sections stained with uranyl acetate and lead citrate (Fig. 1) showed that the individual disc membranes consisted of a central lipid core about 78Å thick in which dark-staining 40Å masses appeared to be embedded from either side.


Author(s):  
Anthony A. Paparo ◽  
Judith A. Murphy

The purpose of this study was to localize the red neuronal pigment in Mytilus edulis and examine its role in the control of lateral ciliary activity in the gill. The visceral ganglia (Vg) in the central nervous system show an over al red pigmentation. Most red pigments examined in squash preps and cryostat sec tions were localized in the neuronal cell bodies and proximal axon regions. Unstained cryostat sections showed highly localized patches of this pigment scattered throughout the cells in the form of dense granular masses about 5-7 um in diameter, with the individual granules ranging from 0.6-1.3 um in diame ter. Tissue stained with Gomori's method for Fe showed bright blue granular masses of about the same size and structure as previously seen in unstained cryostat sections.Thick section microanalysis (Fig.l) confirmed both the localization and presence of Fe in the nerve cell. These nerve cells of the Vg share with other pigmented photosensitive cells the common cytostructural feature of localization of absorbing molecules in intracellular organelles where they are tightly ordered in fine substructures.


Author(s):  
William W. Thomson ◽  
Elizabeth S. Swanson

The oxidant air pollutants, ozone and peroxyacetyl nitrate, are produced in the atmosphere through the interaction of light with nitrogen oxides and gaseous hydrocarbons. These oxidants are phytotoxicants and are known to deleteriously affect plant growth, physiology, and biochemistry. In many instances they induce changes which lead to the death of cells, tissues, organs, and frequently the entire plant. The most obvious damage and biochemical changes are generally observed with leaves.Electron microscopic examination of leaves from bean (Phaseolus vulgaris L.) tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) and cotton (Gossipyum hirsutum L.) fumigated for .5 to 2 hours with 0.3 -1 ppm of the individual oxidants revealed that changes in the ultrastructure of the cells occurred in a sequential fashion with time following the fumigation period. Although occasional cells showed severe damage immediately after fumigation, the most obvious change was an enhanced clarity of the cell membranes.


Author(s):  
D. E. Becker

An efficient, robust, and widely-applicable technique is presented for computational synthesis of high-resolution, wide-area images of a specimen from a series of overlapping partial views. This technique can also be used to combine the results of various forms of image analysis, such as segmentation, automated cell counting, deblurring, and neuron tracing, to generate representations that are equivalent to processing the large wide-area image, rather than the individual partial views. This can be a first step towards quantitation of the higher-level tissue architecture. The computational approach overcomes mechanical limitations, such as hysterisis and backlash, of microscope stages. It also automates a procedure that is currently done manually. One application is the high-resolution visualization and/or quantitation of large batches of specimens that are much wider than the field of view of the microscope.The automated montage synthesis begins by computing a concise set of landmark points for each partial view. The type of landmarks used can vary greatly depending on the images of interest. In many cases, image analysis performed on each data set can provide useful landmarks. Even when no such “natural” landmarks are available, image processing can often provide useful landmarks.


Author(s):  
B. Carragher ◽  
M. Whittaker

Techniques for three-dimensional reconstruction of macromolecular complexes from electron micrographs have been successfully used for many years. These include methods which take advantage of the natural symmetry properties of the structure (for example helical or icosahedral) as well as those that use single axis or other tilting geometries to reconstruct from a set of projection images. These techniques have traditionally relied on a very experienced operator to manually perform the often numerous and time consuming steps required to obtain the final reconstruction. While the guidance and oversight of an experienced and critical operator will always be an essential component of these techniques, recent advances in computer technology, microprocessor controlled microscopes and the availability of high quality CCD cameras have provided the means to automate many of the individual steps.During the acquisition of data automation provides benefits not only in terms of convenience and time saving but also in circumstances where manual procedures limit the quality of the final reconstruction.


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