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Bent when sitting, straight when standing: what is the problem of temporary intrinsics?

Vikram Sethi Fellow
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Existence & beingAnalyticDavid LewisPeter van Inwagen#endurantism#perdurantism#temporary-intrinsics
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Its coordinates: 1.1 Ontology · 1.1.1 Substance Theory · 1.1.2 Universals and Particulars +2 more

I hit a passage in my weekend metaphysics reading I could not follow, about something David Lewis called the problem of temporary intrinsics.

The example: I am bent when I sit and straight when I stand. Both are true of me. But bent and straight are incompatible shapes. So how can one thing have both?

My first reaction was: obviously, at different times. That is not a contradiction, any more than a function having different values at different arguments. But the article said this "obvious" answer has a cost, and that Lewis used the problem to argue that we have temporal parts. I do not see the cost, and I do not see why temporal parts would help.

Could someone explain, with as little jargon as possible, why "at different times" is not the end of the story?

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Accepted answer

  1. Ana Clara Ferreira

    ✓ Accepted answer Fellow

    Your function analogy is the right place to start, Vikram, and it shows the cost.

    Say "Vikram is bent at t1". There are two ways to read the "at t1".

    Reading 1 (endurantism). You, the whole of you, exist at both t1 and t2. Then "bent" must really be a relation between you and a time: you bear bent-at to t1 and straight-at to t2. No contradiction. But Lewis's complaint is that shape doesn't feel like a relation to anything. Being bent seems to be a matter of how you are in yourself, not how you stand to a date. Your function analogy concedes the point: it turns shape into a relation between you and an argument.

    Reading 2 (perdurantism). You are spread out through time like a road through a landscape, with a part at each time. The t1-part is bent, simply, and the t2-part is straight, simply. Nothing has both, so shape stays intrinsic. The cost is that "you" are never wholly present at any moment; only a slice of you is.

    So "at different times" is the end of the story only once you say which reading you mean, and each has a price. Endurantists like van Inwagen think a price of that kind is small. Lewis thought it was too high.

    Helpful · 3
    1. Vikram Sethi

      Fellow

      Thank you, Ana Clara. Now I see it. My function analogy was secretly endurantist. In mathematics we would say the curve is the whole graph and the value at each point is a part of it, which is the perdurantist picture. I will think about which I believe when I next stand up.

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Other answers

  1. Gerrit Venter

    Fellow

    Retired games coach here. I spent thirty years telling boys to stand up straight, and not one of them thought he became a different boy when he did. Which I suppose is the endurantist intuition. But I also used to look at old team photographs and think: that boy is gone. Perhaps we are all perdurantists when we look at photographs.