Counterparts as Near-Equals

Abstract

This paper offers an account of the ship of Theseus paradox along the lines of the so-called nonstandard primitivism about vagueness. This account is inspired by a model of the ship of Theseus paradox offered by Dinis that considers near-equality, in the context of Nonstandard Analysis, as the proper way to model the `same as' relation. The output is a class of models which unifies the semantic account of vague gradable adjectives recently proposed by Dinis and Jacinto with that of the `same as' relation. It does so by taking both paradoxes to arise from a confusion between relations of marginal difference between vague degrees and ``small'' precise relations between the things that have those degrees.