But when the matter making up the body of Lot’s wife was turned into salt, it ceased existing with the categorical parameters of “Lot’s wife”. It’s just normal matter.
“Lot’s Wife” is just normal matter.
I see. So “March tenth” and “my birthday” must therefore refer to two different days?
No, the concept of your birthday is that it’s March 10th.
Yes, Lot’s wife IS just normal matter, but it’s a particular category of normal matter.
Yes: a category we sometimes refer to as “Lot’s Wife”. Why can’t this be for the pillar of salt she turned into?
Because the category isn’t useful if it’s applied to all material that would, at one point, compose a living human being, throughout all time.
For example: there’s probably at least one water molecule in your body from each person who has ever lived on Earth. That doesn’t make you them.
It’s the continuity of the higher-order pattern that determines how we assign identity.
Well, I certainly am not asking it to do this. It can apply to that—given the appropriate question or context. A name needn’t refer to the same aspects all the time. It is not a metaphysical constant (indeed, that would require a far more powerful epistemology than we have dreamt up). It is: whatever is necessary at the time.
[ten years after a funeral] “Where is your wife now?” This can cause us to have several aspects under consideration. Perhaps the reply is that she is in heaven, perhaps it is that she has decomposed and if we really thought about it she’s a part of the ecosystem now. The response to that isn’t: “But that’s a mere answer!” That is the answer to the question, these are the aspects I am considering to answer this question. Ask a different one and different aspects would become important. The focal point of identity is who is doing the identifying, not what is being identified.
That seems needlessly complicated. I see you today, then you leave. I see you again tomorrow. What happened during that intervening time is quite irrelevent to whether or not I recognize you, or in fact what I use to recognize you (say, certain aspects of the gait, or the face, or the voice). For all I really know you’ve been a solid piece of rock—or a pillar of salt, as the case may be—the entire time you’ve been out of my sight.
In a metaphysical sense: of course not. But in some ways, given certain questions, someone may choose to identify a part of me as someone else. I do not become them, nor do I suddenly adopt some extra part, nor has this aspect “really” been there the whole time only now to be fleshed out. But, given certain questions or contexts, I may in fact be identified as someone other than me.
If I had just had a heart transplant, is it my heart, or is it the other person’s? Why should there only be one answer to this when in fact we can consider the problem from various angles, all equally informative? Of course it is my heart, it is in my body, pumping my blood! Of course it isn’t my heart, I just had it transplanted! Given my predisposition, given different questions and contexts, each answer is absolutely valid in that it is meaningful, it has a use in the conversation.
What does it mean for it to be “your heart”? Does it have to be the heart you were born with, or the heart you currently possess?
Either definition could be used, so we accept your scenario, the correct answer to the question “is that your heart” can be either ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Without a context, the question cannot be answered.
Precisely.
Right off like that, the question is mistaken. Oh, I can give various answers, like that it is in my body, or that my brain controls it, and so on. Of course none of these are really properties of the heart per se—being in my body is a context in itself, after all—and the heart has no [metaphysical] properties that make it mine (nor even “a heart”!), but it does have the pseudo-property that I do identify it as such. What are my criteria for this identification? Well, that depends on the questions at hand. How did the subject come up? What aspects of past events are we considering? We are only considering enough to answer the question as the context demands… there is nothing more than that, unless the conversation widens.
Indeed, you are correct: widen the context enough and you’ve got monism of some sort or another. But then “identity” sort of loses any significance, so I don’t know why we would ever—except in philosophy or religion (and even then I don’t see the need, nor the point)—need to take anything that far. All answers disappear, or rather, they become the same. Not a good place to be asking questions, at any rate.
I agree, which is why it seems silly to ask whether the pillar is Lot’s wife without first defining what Lot’s wife is, especially since I think we’re using different definitions.
But the thrust of my posts are that Lot’s Wife is whatever she is identified as given contexts. This is how she can be a pillar of salt.
[pause]
Well, we can use the words to reference anything we want. The words are only meaningful when they’re limited.
Here, you’re Lot’s wife.
Although I am well beyond my depth, I’ve enjoyed this thread. I’m thinking about everything that’s been said, but I have no meaningful response. Except that I’m quite comfortable with arbitrary.
Why do I get the sneaking suspicion that we’re witnessing a similar type of argument that probably took place between Russell (Vorlon) and Wittgenstein (erislover)?
All around, jolly good fun!!
Yes, we can. Which is not to say, “If we all agree it must be true”, whatever that is supposed to mean, but that if we agree on the designation, the sign, then that is all that is necessary. It doesn’t go deeper than that.
“How can Lot’s Wife be a pillar of salt?” Well, who said she was? Lot has reported it to us. Is he in a position to know such a thing? and What happened? —Yes; and, he can tell us.
Will the symbol ‘Lot’s Wife’ always refer to this pillar of salt? No, why should it? It didn’t always refer to his wife as she existed before then (that is, a slice, an instant, of time). “When my wife was a child…” and now, we are not to infer from this that he married her when she was a child. Can the symbol ‘Lot’s Wife’ ever refer to this pillar of salt? Sure, why can’t it, if that is how Lot—who is in a position to know—will sometimes identify it? Perhaps he mourns at it. And from this slice alone, can we conclude anything? No: perhaps it is a grave marker. But suppose, in his moourning, he cries out, “Oh, how can this be all that is left of my wife?” And what are we to do here? Is this pillar somehow his wife? Well, somehow, yes—that is how he is identifying the pillar. In what other sense could something be something else?
Yes, and we are the ones doing the limiting.
“Here”? !! In what sense? And that is: what makes you say that? Suppose this weren’t a debate, but a conversation between two people. What would prompt you to say that? And when would I agree? And if we use the is of identity here, if we agree on it, am I now a woman? Of course not—that isn’t what we agreed on.
Fatwater Fewl
Yes, but this can sometimes have a connotation we don’t want to bring to the table. Sure, the symbol set “The weather is fine” is arbitrary, and so suppose we choose instead to write, “a b c d” to mean, ‘The weather is fine’. Can you say, “a b c d” and mean, “The weather is fine”? And how do you do it? And how would I know that’s what you meant? Arbitrary here only means: we can imagine things differently and achieve the same affect. But by “same” we are not indicating a pure identity across all properties, only the ones under consideration, which are the affects of sharing symbols—whatever those symbols may be.
eponymous, true! 
Aw, erislover, I’d almost never use a, b, c, d, to mean " the weather is fine" – unless I wanted someone to walk away shaking their head.
I do understand arbitrary in this context. And I’m truly enjoying this thread. Please, carry on.
The problem I see, erislover, is that the definition you use to claim the pillar is Lot’s wife is in opposition to the generally accepted defintion of who and what a person is, and you’re not forwarding any arguments to suggest that your defintion should be used instead.
Words are symbols: they refer to concepts, which are the basic forms of thought. If we wish, we can change the concepts referenced by a particular set of words, but then we can’t use the words in the same way as we did before.
Given the concept-mapping that is accepted (and being used by both of us so that we’ll be understood), we can’t meaningfully say that the pillar is Lot’s wife. If you want to discuss a different concept than the one meant by ‘is’, you’ll either have to create a new word for it, or assign the ‘is’-concept to a new word.
*Originally posted by The Vorlon Ambassador’s Aide *
Sorry to interject, but why can’t we use the words in the same way as we did before? What is so sancrosanct about a strict concept-mapping vis-a-vis the words and the concepts to which they refer?
I’ll give you an example to help illustrate what I mean:
The word “game” - to what does the word “game” refer? Does the word “game” only refer to those activities that are rule based? Then what about children playing “Ring-a-Rosy?” Surely, one can call the activity of “Ring-a-Rosy” a game, yet it doesn’t strictly adhere to the definition of a game (one that’s rule based). And I don’t think there would be any confusion in communication if I were to declare that "Those kids over there are playing a game of “Ring-a-Rosy.” At least, assuming that I and my listeners are aware of what “Ring-a-Rosy” is.
The point I’m driving at is that the words we use don’t necessarily have a strict mapping to concepts we are trying to communicate. That is to say, Lot’s wife is a pillar of salt doesn’t necessarily imply that we have to change our language in order to account for the change. We can, but more commonly, when the meaning/context changes, we tend to use the same words to account for our reconceptualization of the issue.
Thus, we shouldn’t think that there is some metaphysical import to the statement “Lot’s wife is a pillar of salt.” I think Wittgenstein would state that you have been “bewitched by language.”
I’ve probably botched my explanation of Wittgenstein’s “family resemblances” argument vis-a-vis words and the concepts to which they refer, so hopefully erislover can step in and clarify matters further.
No, eponymous, I think that is a fine summary here—especially by noting that the “is” of identity needn’t be used to imply any sort of metaphysical state. If the question before me from Vorlon demands that we are using meaning as we normally do, then I claim that I am doing that: Lot’s wife is a pillar of salt.
I would reject the question, “What is Lot’s wife?” if it were meant to list off all properties or relations of which such a phrase could ever be used because we certainly don’t have that in mind when we ask Lot if his wife will be coming to dinner. And of course, after she has turned into a pillar of salt, that sort of question will no longer be appropriate, just as it wouldn’t be if she were dead, or suffered a loss of her mouth and needed to be fed by IV or something similar.
Oh, this is true! We would no longer call Lot’s Wife a person. But the definition of ‘Lot’s Wife’ was never “a person that…” except in cases where personhood was the focus of the conversation. We wouldn’t say, for instance, “My wife—who is a person, you understand—will not be coming to dinner.” Can we say that personhood in the case of “wife” is understood ro implicit? Well, we can, except in cases of death, destruction, or pillar-ness.
Given eponymous’s exposition on the word “game”, I shall also try to discuss a different aspect here to further illustrate the “family resemblence”, especially as it pertains to this case. For we would be compelled, in discussing the sort and quantity of relationships we would need to consider to analytically define a person—say, to use Wittgenstein’s hypothetical person—named Mr N.N., and I report to you, for example, that “I thought of Mr N.N. when I said that,” or “I called him to mind”, can we say that I must also have had all those relationships in mind—even if I couldn’t actually enumerate them? And does this inability to have such an assortment of properties and relationships in mind when I call him to mind mean that, in fact, I didn’t call him to mind? For if I were to curse him, “Damn that Mr N.N.”, do I shudder to think that, in fact, what I was thinking of might have only superficially meant him? For couldn’t many of the qualities I use to describe Mr N.N. in fact apply to someone else? So how do I curse HIM? Him exactly?
If my concept of him does not, in fact, contain all those properties and relationships, this is not to say we have no concept of him, or of Lot’s Wife as is the case here, but rather that how we choose to define a person in various cases only depends on what we need to consider. “Is Lot’s Wife a person?”—I feel as if you would have me answer “yes” as it must be analytically true, that we can mean a lot of things by “Lot’s Wife”, but we couldn’t mean that. But Lot’s Wife turned into a pillar of salt—this is the report we are given. And doesn’t this tell us something? I mean, can’t we decide many things about the situation from this report?
Is one of the things we can decide: “Lot’s Wife is no longer Lot’s Wife”? I don’t think this is true, and if it were it certainly has a sort of paradox in it.
Ring-around-the-Rosy is rule-based. You hold hands in a circle, you slowly rotate in a chosen direction while the poem is recited, you throw yourself on the ground while yelling the word ‘Down!’ at the appropriate time. Repeat.
erislover: What paradox?!
If you’re going to play fast-and-loose with meaning, try running your argument backwards in time: when was there ever anything that wasn’t Lot’s wife?
Without settling on any definition, you’ll be able to generate whatever conclusions you like, but none of them will be meaningful.