Abstract

This chapter contains sections titled: This chapter is a study in the epistemology of identity. It analyses discrimination between things as activation of the knowledge that they are distinct, and indiscriminability as the impossibility of activating such knowledge. The interaction of general features of knowledge with general features of identity needs special attention. Since the indiscriminability of objects is less a route to knowledge that they are identical than a block to knowledge that they are distinct. The first section develops a cognitive model of discrimination. The second section uses the model to explain some formal features of indiscriminability, such as its failure to be transitive. The third section uses the model to expound a sense in which discrimination is intentional. In the fourth section, this intentionality is observed to threaten an attempt to define a transitive notion of indiscriminability in terms of a non‐transitive notion.