Counterparts as Near-Equals

Bruno Dinis; Bruno Jacinto

doi:10.12775/LLP.2025.003

Authors

Bruno Dinis Departamento de Matemática, Centro de Investigação em Matemática e Aplicações – CIMA Universidade de Évora,, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2143-3289
Bruno Jacinto Departamento de História e Filosofia das Ciências, Faculdade de Ciências LanCog, Centro de Filosofia Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4342-544X

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.12775/LLP.2025.003

Keywords

Ship of Theseus, nonstandard primitivism, near-equality

Abstract

This paper offers an account of the ship of Theseus paradox along the lines of the so-called nonstandard primitivism about vagueness. This account is inspired by a model of the ship of Theseus paradox offered by Dinis that considers near-equality, in the context of Nonstandard Analysis, as the proper way to model the `same as' relation. The output is a class of models which unifies the semantic account of vague gradable adjectives recently proposed by Dinis and Jacinto with that of the `'same as' relation. It does so by taking both paradoxes to arise from a confusion between relations of marginal difference between vague degrees and ``"small'' precise relations between the things that have those degrees.

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