Designators, descriptions, and artifact persistence
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hobbes' (1672/1913) famous puzzle of the Ship of Theseus - in which a wooden ship's parts are replaced plank by plank, and the old planks are subsequently reassembled to create a second ship - has been the source of debate about the criteria that underlie human judgments of individual artifact persistence. This puzzle has led some philosophers to the paradoxical conclusion that an artifact observed at one time is the same persisting individual as two artifacts seen at a later time. We argue that prior discussions of the puzzle have conflated property persistence (judged in conjunction with a description, like "Theseus' ship") with individual persistence (judged in conjunction with a designator, like "X"). In three studies, we manipulated the linguistic expression (description, designator) used to label the original object in the puzzle. When participants solved the puzzle in conjunction with a description, they gave systematically high ratings to any object (either or both) that could be inferred to match the description. Yet when participants solved the same puzzle in conjunction with a designator, they gave significantly higher ratings to one post-change object (the object made of the reassembled old parts) than to the other post-change object (the object made of replacement parts). The results suggest that individual persistence judgments concerning the puzzle (i.e., those made in conjunction with a designating expression) are not paradoxical but rather are based on the continuity of the object's parts/material.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.036 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".