Carl Vaught's "The Identity of Indiscernibles and the Concept of Substance"

[@SidneyBloom]

Does not the property "being at X distance from" defines by itself a distinction between two things? You can say of both spheres "it's at 5 meters from the other", but what would that mean if there weren't actually two? Thanks for the videos.

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

The problem is that if you can't tell the difference between Castor and Pollux you can't tell the difference between "5 meters from Castor" and "5 meters from Pollux." And there's nothing else in their universe that they could at any distance from. O'Leary-Hawthorne (see other videos on the subject) suggests that it's just one sphere at a certain distance from _itself_ !

[@SidneyBloom]

@@TeacherOfPhilosophy Thank you, I have watched the other videos now. They have been very helpful. I may be wrong, but any meaningful notion of "distance" that I can think of assume that any non zero amount of distance implies some difference (or in other words, that the same thing cannot be in the two locations/states at once), in which case there's nothing to prove, no need to label the spheres with some additional property to establish that they are indeed two things. It seems to me that the thought experiment depends on what notion of distance one is using. Even the idea of a sphere is already telling you something about the structure of that universe.

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

That might make a nice objection to O'Leary-Hawthorne! It looks to me like you're taking the standard Max Black approach: They are different things, and there's not much else to say about it, and that's evidence that PII is wrong.

[@aliqazilbash5231]

sorry I like being invincible and that takes a lot of prep work, so if you can excuse me

[@Renegen1]

These thought experiments are beyond silly. Perhaps philosophers should use actual observable events to prove or disprove their theories rather than fantastical impossible premises.

[@TeacherOfPhilosophy]

We do that too. I think that was Robert Casullo's response to this question, actually.