Persistence

Explores what it takes for ways of thinking and talking about the ways things exist over time, to be true.

Kristie Miller (Author)

9781009056007, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 11 August 2022

75 pages
22.8 x 15.2 x 0.6 cm, 14 kg

Persistence realism is the view that ordinary sentences that we think and utter about persisting objects are often true. Persistence realism involves both a semantic claim, about what it would take for those sentences to be true, and an ontological claim about the way things are. According to persistence realism, given what it would take for persistence sentences to be true, and given the ontology of our world, often such sentences are true. According to persistence error-theory, they are not. This Element considers several different views about the conditions under which those sentences are true. It argues for a view on which it is relatively easy to vindicate persistence realism, because all it takes is for the world to be the way it seems to us. Thereby it argues for the view that relations of numerical identity, or of being-part-of-the-same-object, are neither necessary nor sufficient for persistence realism.

1. Introduction
2. What is Persistence
3. Persistence Error-Theory
4. Semantic Processionism
5. Objections to Semantic Processionism
6. Persistence Realism
7. The Nature of Actual Processions
8. Conclusion.

Subject Areas: Philosophy: epistemology & theory of knowledge [HPK], Philosophy: metaphysics & ontology [HPJ], Philosophy [HP]