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.
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