Yet Another Paper on the Supervenience Argument against Coincident Entities∗

Statues and lumps of clay are said by some to coincide—to be numeri-cally distinct despite being made up of the same parts. They are said to be numerically distinct because they differ modally. Coincident objects would be non-modally indiscernible, and thus appear to violate the super-venience of modal properties on nonmodal properties. But coincidence and supervenience are in fact consistent if the most fundamental modal features are not properties, but are rather relations that are symmetric as between coincident entities, relations such as “opposite-possibly surviving being squashed”. 1. Coincident entities and modal supervenience Statues and lumps of clay (to take one example) are said by some to coincide—to be numerically distinct despite being made up of the same parts. In order to screen off certain issues about time, let’s consider Alan Gibbard’s (1975) example of Lumpl and Goliath. Lumpl is a lump of clay that is synthesized in statue form, and is later destroyed instantaneously while still in statue form. Goliath is the statue created in this process. According to the friends of coincidence, Goliath and Lumpl have different modal properties: only Lumpl might have survived being squashed. Thus, by Leibniz’s Law, Lumpl is not identical to Goliath. Since Lumpl and Goliath are clearly made up of the same parts, they coincide. Lumpl and Goliath seem to be nonmodally indiscernible: they seem to share all their nonmodal features, both intrinsic and relational.1 It is this that the inuential “supervenience argument ” against coincidentalism targets. For modal properties are not “brute ” (or so the supervenience argument assumes)