Existence and Identity - Why the Persistence Debate Has Not Converged and What Resolves It
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The analytic debate over persistence has produced sharply opposed positions — endurantism and perdurantism, animalism and psychological continuity theory — without convergence. This paper argues that the failure to converge is structural: the debate conflates two logically independent questions. The question ‘does the system continue to exist?’ is governed by the persistence condition IR ≤ 1. The question ‘does the continuing system remain the same system?’ is governed by the Frame Continuity Condition (FCC). Neither condition implies the other. Any theory that does not formally separate them generates underdetermined verdicts for cases where the two conditions diverge. La Profilée provides the formal separation. The paper applies it to the canonical cases — Ship of Theseus, teleportation, fission, gradual replacement, personal identity — and shows that each resolves into a determinate structural configuration. The existing positions — Parfit, Sider, Olson, Hawley, Wiggins — are shown to be tracking one condition or the other. The paper does not propose a new position. It proposes a level shift: from competing answers to a conflated question, to a formal architecture that makes the question precise.
Author: Maibom, Marc
Language: English
Subfield: Experimental and Cognitive Psychology
Field: Psychology
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7160822996
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