Sameness: A Joke

Sameness looks like an indispensable concept, without which we would be unable to make sense. Surely we need to be able to identify words that are 'the same', or meanings that are 'the same', in order to speak at all?

But what does this mean? Can we be sure that the 'sameness' we employ today is the same 'sameness' we used yesterday? Must 'sameness' be a thing we can find in the world, or a feature of things we can find in the world, in order for it to work in our language and thought? How could we be sure that we had found it, and that it was the same each time that we did?

Clearly, we can, at least implicitly, agree about this in our present conversation: If you and I had sufficiently incongruous conceptions of 'sameness', if we radically disagreed about which things were the same and which were different, this conversation - perhaps any conversation - would be impossible.

We would not be able to discuss sameness at all.

And now that we have, I suspect it will never seem quite the same to us again.

Maybe the Central Question?

There are two questions we might ask about the relationship between the world and the way we speak:

(1)    How does the fact that we have a shared experience of the world validate the way we talk about it?

(2)    How does the fact that we can talk about the world in the way that we do validate our sense of shared experience?

The first one has been the focus of the Western empiricist tradition, but only the second one can be rendered intelligible.

With respect to (1), we cannot even ask questions about our shared experience, or mutually investigate the intelligibility of what we say, without attributing some minimal sense to what we say to one another.

With respect to (2), the question 'can we talk about the world?' can only be answered in the affirmative, since its denial is a statement about the world - that we cannot talk about it. Since we can talk about the world, we can draw conclusions about its nature, and some of these conclusions will have a bearing on what we mean by 'sharing experience', and to what extent we actually achieve this.