The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Review: Fullerton - On Sameness and Identity
This is in spirit and execution an excellent piece of work; it is through work of this kind that a tenable epistemology — the chief desideratum in Philosophy just now — will be arrived at. The author is content with the task of" clearing the ground a little." He aims at pointing out the differences in connotation of the highly ambiguous word "same," and showing the elements they have in common, and in tracing some of the difficulties and absurdities which have sprung from using the word loosely and without proper connotation. He keeps his aim so perfectly in view throughout his brochure that he has given students a model of investigative work. He apologizes for hair-splitting and for being uninteresting, but his subject is thorny. In the first half of his work the author thinks out for himself seven different senses of sameness; he deals first with sameness in things that he finds to be immediately known, and then with sameness which may obtain in a world or worlds beyond consciousness, finding that these seven senses of the word cover all actual and possible applications of it. The common notion that unites them is the idea of similarity. Identity is a kind of sameness, the sense of sameness where the consciousness of duality has fallen into the background. The fact that Professor Fullerton has given only two pages to the discussion of Identity shows that for one thing he regards the word "identity" as less subject to ambiguity than "sameness," and for another, that he has not desired to go into the epistemological relations of the two words. His merging identity into sameness [as a kind of sameness], and his reducing sameness to the conception of similarity, makes one wish that he had gone on to give us a theory of similarity. This is the line of course on which his work might be carried on; his distinction of sameness and identity would probably merge into the broader one of difference and similarity, which one would regard as expressing certain categories of the logical judgment. It is just this question of where sameness ultimately consists that comes up to the mind after following the writer's careful analyses of the kinds of sameness. I wonder if he really means to let identity lapse into sameness and so get only one notion; if he does, one would like to know where he places that notion, whether on the level of perception or of judgment; if he does not, — and I think the notions are parallel or antithetical, — he would find that he could not keep his question apart from the theory of Predication; it is only through considering the notions of sameness and identity in the light of the judgment that one can really say wherein they consist, e.g. whether they are things or categories.
If Professor Fullerton had tried to tell us more about the link between his kinds of sameness, his analysis — which it must have given him great trouble to think out — would have been more appreciable, and less difficult to summarize. One regrets in this connection the omission of Leibnitz from his historical excursus; not only is Leibnitz's thinking on the question of sameness excessively difficult, affording therefore scope for the application of Professor Fullerton's distinctions, but it is valuable in so far as it brings to a focus the different points of view on the matter. Again, while one admires the way in which our author pursues his aim without entangling himself in theories of perception, whether subjective or realistic, showing the representatives of these theories along with the common-sensist and the sceptic how they are affected by his strictures about sameness, one would have wished him to indicate which way of regarding knowledge seems to him freest of difficulties, as tested by the categories he is dealing in. The examination of Dr. McCosh's Realism may be regarded as a step in this direction. I question if the booklet ought to have been called a psychological study — epistemology it certainly is: there is almost no psychology in it; for had there been, one would have had the psychological solution of sameness as relative identity of content in presentations brought forward. The subject, I repeat, makes the book a crabbed one, but there are many passages where the thought has both range and rhythm. Much of the historical matter of the second part of the book will be of great use to students; the careful understanding the author shows of the prolix and prosaic Locke, and his acute criticism of Spencer's logic seems to me among the salient features of the book. There is a great similarity in tone, and method, and scope between this study and Dr. Pikler's recent volume on objective existence; both books to my mind represent the best sense in which philosophers may go "back" previously to going steadily onwards.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
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