30 juin-2 juil. 2025 Nantes (France)
A Dialetheist Solution to the Problem of Change
Sergi Oms  1@  
1 : Universitat de Barcelona

Change has always been a perplexing phenomenon. One of the puzzles surrounding it is the so-called Problem of Change, according to which change is problematic because it apparently involves a single object having incompatible properties at different times, seemingly contradicting Leibniz's Law. Solutions to this problem can be categorized based on whether they involve directly relativizating some of the ontological categories present in the Problem (objects, properties, and exemplification) to time, or whether they adopt a non-tensed approach that does not involve any direct relativization to time. While most proposed solutions fall into the former category, there has been recent original work on solutions of the latter kind. This paper aims to contribute to this discussion by exploring a new dialetheist non-tensed approach to the Problem of Change. According to this proposal, if we consider an object o undergoing change, taken at a time t (call it o') before the change and at a time t' (call it o'') after the change, o' and o'' are both the same and not the same object; so, in a way, changing is just being different to oneself. Given Leibniz's Law and the behavior of the material conditional in paraconsistent logics such as LP, it follows that, o both has and does not have the accidental properties it possesses throughout its history. I will also show that the Problem of Change is an Inclosure Paradox (such as the Liar, Russell's Paradox, or the Sorites). Finally, I will explore some problems of the dialetheic approach to the Problem of Change and some possible responses to them.


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