Quine, "Identity, Ostension, and Hypostasis" — Part 1 of 2

Every undergraduate is told you cannot bathe in the same river twice, and nobody has ever quite believed it. Quine agrees that you can—flatly, you can—and then spends thirteen pages working out precisely what it costs to say that this is so! The cost of this is a machine: take some acts of pointing, add an identity claim, and objects come out the other end. The machine builds a river. Then it builds the colour red. Then it is asked to build the shapes square and triangle, and something goes badly wrong.

In Part 1, Solomon and Clementine assemble the machine and watch it break. Heracleitus dissolved in two sentences; river-stages and water-stages, and how you may bathe in the same water twice while bathing in two different rivers; why pointing on its own fixes almost nothing un ...