Fuzzy Identity and Identity Without Essentialistic Commitment

The concept of identity is a logical abstraction out of the act of identification. To identify is to recognize something as something, or to affiliate something with something, in accordance with certain criteria or sets of rules either pre-conceived or to be supplied subsequently. Ideally speaking, identification is achieved through perception or other warranted cognitive processes and not simply a matter of arbitrary conceptual decision. That is to say, identification is basically an epistemic or at least a doxastic concept, or it can be defined in terms of concepts of this sort. In other words, the concept of identification, and consequently the concept of identity, are knowledge-based and/or belief-loaded.

When a concept is an epistemic one, the content is constantly subject to review, revision and reconstruction. In our case, what is called "identification," or for that matter "identity," is open to change in relation to our ways and means of handling knowledge and belief.

The Identity-as and the Identity-with

Let us single out two forms of identity here: the identity-as and the identity-with. When we proclaim an identity, the statement can be in the following form:

(1) Person X identifies himself as an S.
For instance,

(2) John identifies himself as a school teacher.
Of course, (2) is highly unidomatic. In fact, the whole business of identity-talk in the contemporary sense may be seen as a new invention, if not a total creation. A much more natural and conventional way of saying (2) would be something like the following :

(3) John considers himself a school teacher.
Or again, less traditionally,

(4) John perceives of himself as a school teacher.

This is an example of "self-identity." There is, however, "other-identity" of this identity-as type, namely,

(5) Person X identifies another person Y as an S.
For instance,

(6) John identifies Peter as a school teacher.

If (6) appears less unidomatic than (2), the reason may not be just psychological. A good explanation might be given by addressing the distinction between the first person, the "I," and the other person, the "you," and the "he." But this is beyond the scope of this paper.

Another form of identity-talk is of the following kind:

(7) Person X identifies himself with another person Y as an S.
Or the following:

(8) Person X identifies another person Y with another person Z as an S.

This type of identity-talk admits of a good number of variations. For instance, the Y in (7) and (8) above may not be a person. It can be an impersonal "entity" such as a family, a society, a nation, a culture or a (the?) humanity (human kind), etc., or an impersonal quality, property or attribute──a familial one, a societal one, a national one, a cultural one, or a "humanistic" one.

It could be argued, and a logical construction can be forwarded to show, that the identity-talks of one kind, namely the identity-as, can be reformulated as, or reduced to, that of the other kind, the identity-with. Again, we shall not go into the technical matters of logical reduction here.

Identity as a Many-place Predicate

Since identity-talks are some relatively new phenomena in this century, we may not have a fairly complete and commonly accepted set of logical and grammatical rules governing the behavior of an identity-talk. As illustration, let us just ask ourselves the following question: If we treat "identity," and hence "identify," as a logical predicate, or as a mathematical function, then how many parameters does it take? That is, what is the degree of this identity-predicate? Is it a 2-place predicate as indicated above in (1), or a 3-place predicate as suggested in (5), or a 4-place predicate as exemplified in (8)? Can it not be a n-place one, where n≧5? Or might it not be a variable rather than a definite or invaried n-place one, where n has a range of values determined by a set of rules?

To take an example, may we not present an identity-talk as having the following form?

(9) X identifies Y as an S in the context C according to criteria (or rules) R for the purpose(s) P.

Of course, some other parameters can be further introduced in addition to C,R and P. Furthermore, all this parameters can be self-multiplied, or further specified, to become complex and multi-dimensional, generating more and more parameters of a lesser degree of generality.

All this seems to indicate that an identity-talk is a speech act of a very complex and complicated type. A pragmatic study of the identity-talks might well show that different persons engaged in the talk take identity differently. Properly speaking, they may not be engaged in exactly the same speech act.

The Identity-of: Extensional vs Intensional Identity

A concept or, to be precise, its linguistic counterpart can be treated either extensionally or intensionally. The concept of identity follows exactly the same logic. The act of identification can be carried out effectively by reference to existing or imagined "exemplar(s)" without any explicit intensional characterization. A simple case of this kind is what we might call "mother-identity" or "mother-land identity." A person may consider himself a member of a community because that is where his mother is. This of course does not preclude the possibility that a through explanation can be advanced as to the reason why affection for one's mother, or one's mother-land, is extended to become affiliation to the community or culture that one's mother is in. The point is that the related and corresponding intensional characterization can be implicit, unconscious, or simply lost and forgotten. Identity, or identification, just like anything else, can be habit-forming. It may become less and less reflective and thought about and more and more habitual and intuitive in the long process of our mental development and performance of speech act.

On the other hand, the intensional identity commonly conceived involves the specification of characteristics that delineate, or shall we say define, this so-called the identity of (or an identity of) someone or something. However, let us point out at this juncture that intensional identity of this sort, namely the identity-of, as we may call it, is more of a gloomy logical dream than a happy empirical reality. There is no clear-cut essence of a kind, not to mention that of an individual. If we take an evolutionary stand that all individuals come and become, then they may retain only their nominal or logical "personal" identities. On the other hand, the species come and go, they lose their empirical "natural-kind"-hood. Existential identification through exemplars is everywhere, while essentialistic identity through intensionality is nowhere to be achieved. Examples constitute a loose "family" (Wittgensteinean family resemblance). They differ, one from another. This suggests that vague or fuzzy identities through the extensional identity-as and/or identity-with can go on and on with hermeneutical seriousness while clear and precise identities through intensional identity-of would, sooner rather than later, lose their essentialistic dignity.

From this point of view, it seems to follow that, among other things, the multiple-identity talks, if treated existentially rather than essentialistically, constitute a kind of speech act that would broaden our personal frontiers and enrich our cultural content. They help to change us as individuals, to reform our culture, and to reformulate the rules of our rationality, sensibility and humanity.