ABSTRACT
If identity were sortal-relative and sortal-relative because R (= the Relativity of Identity) held, then that might be thought to support D (= the thesis of the Sortal Dependency of Identity). For D is a thesis that certain champions of R have mistakenly wished to equate with a kind of obverse of R. This obverse is the doctrine that, on pain of indefiniteness, every identity statement stands in radical need of an answer to the question same what? 1 But in fact R is false, and can lend no support to anything; and there has been no temptation at all to claim that there is some semantical indeterminacy in the plain ‘a is b’ locution. Still less then has there been temptation to claim that there is an incompleteness such that an identity sentence ‘a is b’ might be true when glossed with one sortal concept truly applicable to a and false when glossed with another.
