There’s a principle very often appealed to in philosophy, which says this:
This is named after the philosopher Leibniz pronounced “Libe-nitz”.
If there’s some property that x has and y lacks (or y has and x lacks), then x and y can’t be one and the same thing; they must be two different things.
That sounds extremely reasonable. And it doesn’t just sound like something true of physical things, with physical properties. It sounds like it would also be true of non-physical souls (if there are such things), numbers, words, and so on.
An effective way to prove that any two things are really two, and not one, would be to find some property that they differ in.
Here’s an example of using Leibniz’s Law in some natural reasoning:
Similarly:
These seem to be good pieces of reasoning. In other words, if the premises are true, it seems legitimate to infer that the conclusion will be true too.
Of course, I might be fooled into accepting some of these premises when they’re not true. Maybe the butler is left-handed after all; he’s just managed to fool me into thinking he isn’t. Still, that wouldn’t show that the reasoning is bad. The reasoning wouldn’t have led me astray; it was my being fooled into accepting the premise that did so.
Note that Leibniz’s Law doesn’t say we can infer like this: “x is F, but y is G, so x isn’t identical to y.” Maybe x and y are both F and G. For example, suppose it’s the 1980s and I’ve just met President Reagan. Somebody asks me, Hey do you think he’s that same guy, Ronald Reagan, who acted in the old westerns we’ve been watching? I say “No way! Ronald Reagan is a famous actor. But President Reagan is a politician. So they can’t be identical.” Clearly my reasoning here is mistaken. After all, Ronald Reagan was both a famous actor and a politician. I must have been thinking that President Reagan was a politician instead of being a famous actor; that is, I must have been thinking it’s not possible for someone to be both a politician and a famous actor. But that’s wrong. This is possible. (And Reagan is not the only example.) The lesson here is that when we’re applying Leibniz’s Law, if x does have some property F, we should be checking whether y lacks that property F. The fact that y is G only helps here if its being G is incompatible with its being F.
Leibniz’s Law and its (equivalent) contrapositive are stated above. These should be distinguished from the converse of Leibniz’s Law, which says:
If x and y have all the same properties, then they are one and the same thing.This principle may also be true (and Leibniz himself thought it was true), but it’s more controversial than what we’re calling Leibniz’s Law. Let’s pause for a moment to understand that.
Everyone will agree that if x and y have the same properties, they’ll thereby be have to identical in some sense. Suppose you and I bought identical laptops, meaning we have laptops of the same model and configuration and color. Still, we have two laptops. They’re the same in the sense of being duplicates or copies of each other. But they aren’t one and the same laptop. Leibniz’s Law and its converse aren’t talking about identity in the sense that the two laptops are identical. They’re talking about what’s involved in there being just one single laptop. When is it right to say that my laptop and your laptop are one and the same thing? (Maybe someone stole the laptop from me and then sold it to you…?) Philosophers use the label numerical identity to mean being the same in that sense, the sense of being just one thing rather than two. It contrasts to the sense of being the same or identical in which two laptops are duplicates of each other. That is instead called qualitative identity.
Here’s another illustration of this contrast. Suppose Tamar has two children, Alicia and Abe. For Christmas, she buys them each a new red bike. She makes sure to get two bikes of the same design and color, else the kids might get upset and want the bike the other one got. So now: Alicia and Abe have the same bikes, and also the same mother. They “have the same bikes” in the sense of having qualitatively identical or duplicate bikes — there are still two bikes, one for each child. They “have the same mother” in the sense of numerical identity. Unlike the bikes, there is just a single mother, that the children have to share.
When philosophers say “one and the same thing,” as in Leibniz’s Law and its converse, they’re signalling that they mean to be talking about numerical identity.
Try not to confuse the principle of Leibniz’s Law and its converse. The principle of Leibniz’s Law, that we’re focusing on, never delivers the result that some things are identical. It can only tell us that things aren’t identical.
The converse of Leibniz’s Law, on the other hand, says that if two things have all the same properties, they really must in fact always be just one thing. Whether you agree with that will turn on subtle questions and what other metaphysical theories you accept. (Does spatial position count as a property? Are a statue and the clay it’s made of just one and the same object? And so on.) Leibniz’s Law, on the other hand, seems to be a lot more straightforward and less controversial. (As we’ll see, though, complexities will emerge in how we’re allowed to apply it.)
Leibniz’s Law is not supposed to rule out the possibility of things changing their properties over time. Perhaps when I owned the laptop, it didn’t have any scratches on it. But when you purchased it, it had a St Pauli logo scratched into it. Leibniz’s Law is compatible with that. It doesn’t say we should argue Prof Pryor’s laptop was unscratched, this laptop is scratched, so therefore they’re two different laptops.
Instead, it might be that Prof Pryor’s laptop was unscratched yesterday (but so too was your laptop), and your laptop is scratched today: but if they’re really the same laptop, then Prof Pryor’s laptop is scratched today too.
Some materialists think that you and/or your mind or self is one individual object m, and your body (or maybe just your brain) is an individual object b, and that m and b are numerically identical. As we discussed before, materialists don’t have to think this. A materialist always has the option of denying that the mind is any kind of substance or object. They could say that minds are more like hikes or dances. What makes them a materialist is that they think all the objects there are, are physical. But they don’t have to say that the minds are some of those physical objects, anymore than we have to say that hikes or dances are.
But suppose you are the kind of materialist who does want to say that m is an object, and that it’s the same object as some physical b, such as your body or brain.
Dualists on the other hand think there’s a non-physical individual object s, namely your immaterial soul, that could in principle exist without your body. Many dualists will say that m = s. (Others may think m = some combination of s and b.) All dualists will say that m ≠ b. That is, they’ll think that m and b are not numerically identical, where b is your body or brain or any physical object.
How might the dualist argue that m ≠ b? Are there any properties that m and b seem to differ with respect to, so that dualists can appeal to Leibniz’s Law to show this?
They want to argue “minds can’t be physical because physical objects are … but minds aren’t …”
Some ways of filling in the dots that students have suggested in past years include:
A dualist may appeal to properties like these, arguing that physical objects have them but minds lack them, so minds can’t be physical objects.
The materialists who want to identify you and/or your mind or self with some physical object will resist those arguments. I’ll sort the dualist’s arguments into several different groups, differentiated by what kind of complaint these materialist will make about them.
Some of the dualist’s arguments may have the same problem as our Ronald Reagan example discussed earlier. Here’s an example:
This argument can only succeed if being mental is incompatible with taking up space. And we haven’t yet settled that. That’s just what the dualist and the materialist are arguing about.
So the dualist’s arguments should always have the form of saying the one thing has some property, but the other thing lacks that same property.
Let’s try to fix up the previous argument to say that, explicitly.
This is an improvement, in that it’s a clear application of Leibniz’s Law. It does seem right that if the premises of this argument are true, the conclusion would have to be true too. The problem though is that the second premise is too controversial to be helpful to use in an argument for dualism. It’s similar to if I were trying to persuade you that God existed, and I argued: “God exists because the Bible says so; and nothing written in the Bible is false.” It may be that everything I’m saying is correct, but you probably wouldn’t be very impressed or moved by my argument. The premise “nothing written in the Bible is false” is just too controversial to appeal to when what we’re trying to establish is whether God exists. Only someone who was already persuaded of the conclusion we’re aiming for is likely to be ready to accept the premise. This is the kind of argument that philosophers call question-begging.
Some arguments are really obviously question-begging, in that you can just see the conclusion among the premises: “God exists, and wrote the Bible. So God exists.” In other arguments, like the one I described a moment ago with the premise “Nothing written in the Bible is false,” the conclusion might not explicitly be among the premises. Still, these arguments are going to be unpersuasive because they start from points which are argumentatively too close to the conclusions they’re trying to establish. A good, persuasive argument should instead have more of a surprising punch to it. It should make its audience see that premises that you’d think are uncontroversial, or at least much less controversial than your conclusion, when taken together in fact do force us to accept that conclusion, after all.
The “Nothing written in the Bible is false” argument wouldn’t do that. And neither would the “Minds do not take up space” argument.
In each case, a materialist, or someone who was just trying to make up their mind whether to accept materialsm or dualism, wouldn’t be ready to accept the second premise. If the dualist wants to talk us into their view, they should try harder to find premises that seem plausible even to people who haven’t yet subscribed to dualism.
Another group of arguments for dualism at first seem like they might achieve that. Consider:
Here premise 1 seems to be true, at least as it’s most naturally understood. And premise 2 also seems to be true. And the rest seems to be just an application of Leibniz’s Law. So is this a good argument for dualism?
The problem here is that the sense of “in” where it seems to be clearly true that Aunt Lobelia is in my mind doesn’t seem to be the same sense of “in” where it seems to be clearly true that Aunt Lobelia is not in my brain. For the latter, let’s say “spatially inside.” Sure, Aunt Lobelia is not spatially inside my brain. But is she spatially inside my mind? Don’t think we want to say that. The sense in which she clearly seems to be “in” my mind is that I’m thinking about her, I have thoughts concerning her. It’s not at all clear that that means she is spatially inside my mind. (The dualist wouldn’t want to say she’s spatially inside my mind, anyway! Since they think minds don’t take up space.)
So this argument equivocates. Premise 1 seems plausible if we understand “in” with one meaning (“in my mind” = thinking about). Premise 2 seems plausible if we understand “in” with a second, different meaning (“in” = spatially inside). And if you don’t notice that “in” has changed meanings, it might look like the reasoning structure is correct. But for it really to be correct, we have to understand “in” consistently, with a single meaning.
The dualist may think that the argument is correct with “in” understood consistently in the sense of “thinking about her.” That is, they may accept all the premises and the conclusion of this argument:
But now we’d once again have an argument whose second premise is too controversial to be persuasive, in an inquiry about whether or not to be dualist.
Where have we gotten so far? The materialist complains that if the dualist makes sure to be explicit about what property it is that the mind has but that physical objects lack (or what property it is that physical objects have but the mind lacks), the argument is going to be question-begging. Nobody is going to find the argument persuasive unless they’ve already subscribed to dualism.
The only times so far when it’s seemed otherwise, it was because the dualist was equivocating, and switching the meaning of some word halfway through the argument. One premise sounded plausible with the word understood one way, and the other premise sounded plausible with the word understood the second way.
But it turns out there’s a group of arguments for dualism that seem to be vulnerable to neither of these complaints. These are arguments where the premises do all seem to be plausible, even to people who haven’t yet subscribed to dualism. And it’s not obvious that any words need to switch their meaning halfway through the argument, for the premises to seem obvious in this way.
The general flavor of these arguments can be summarized like this:
The specifics of these arguments will turn on how they unpack the notion of this “special access.” As we discussed in earlier webnotes, here are some things philosophers say to explain what they mean here.
The details are controversial, but many philosophers would agree that our access to (at least some parts or aspects of) our own minds is “special” in one or more of these ways. And we don’t seem to have that same special access to anyone else’s mind, nor to facts about our brains or bodies or things in our physical environments.
Perhaps this can be used in an argument by Leibniz’s Law that our minds aren’t identical to anything physical.
For example:
That argument is reminiscent of the one that Gennaro discusses, which is phrased in terms of what is “knowable through introspection.”
Or here’s the argument that van Inwagen discusses, unpacking “specialness” in our sense (c):
These applications of Leibniz’s Law are more challenging than the ones we considered before. It’s less clear how the materialist should respond here. What do you think?
