Coincidence Problems Without Properties

Professor Balashov maintains that—so far—statements of the so-called problems of material coincidence (‘Lump and Vase’, ‘Tibs and Tibbles’.) have been framed in ways that require appeals to ‘non-categorical properties’—modal properties like ‘could survive radical deformation’, for example, or temporally indexed properties like ‘having existed at noon yesterday’, ‘having once been vase-shaped’, and ‘being a thing that will at some point lose its present shape and will, at some later point, acquire that shape a second time’. The professor suggests that such properties are insufficiently 'robust' to pose real, substantive problems about the identities of material things. This chapter contends that the so-called puzzles of material coincidence can be stated without any appeal to properties of any sort. The author confines his remarks to ‘the problem of Lump and Vase’ and asks whether the following argument (‘Argument A’) is formally valid: Lump existed at noon yesterdayPremise2.~Vase existed at noon yesterdayPremise3.~Lump = Vase1,2.