The Ship of Theseus

[Philip]

How essences work and all that is ametaphysical problem as far as names are concerned it is only a linguistic problem. I don't see how the problem doesn't go away when we adopt a different view of language?

But names signify essences---we are discussing essences, not mere names. Wittgenstein would say that essences are mere names used in a particular community's language-game.

 

[jwright82]

How essences work and all that is ametaphysical problem as far as names are concerned it is only a linguistic problem. I don't see how the problem doesn't go away when we adopt a different view of language?

But names signify essences---we are discussing essences, not mere names. Wittgenstein would say that essences are mere names used in a particular community's language-game.

Names can be used to signify anything at all. The particular name under discussion is "ship of thessus", which in order to be meaningful only has to refer to some object in reality or memory. This particular name has full meaning if it refers to that ship in the harbor at peir 1. The meaningfullness of word doesn't go away if we have renevated the original boat because everyone in the community uses the same way. If you wnated to talk about essences in general, if there is such a thing, than that is fine but the OP was over the atteachment of the name to the object and a linguistic mistake was made and that is why, in my opinion, the problem arose.