ABSTRACT
If you were someone who knew me when I was twenty, and you met me again today, you might say to me: ‘Peter, how you’ve changed! You’re totally different from the Peter Goldie that I knew so well.’ For you to say that I’ve changed, or even that I’m ‘totally different’, isn’t to say, of course, that I’m literally a different person, just as to say of a tomato that it’s changed – it was firm and green and is now soft and red – isn’t to say that it’s literally a different tomato; rather, the very same tomato has different properties. So what you’re saying about me is that I, the very same person that I was at twenty, have different properties. The different properties that you notice about me, not having seen me for such a long time, are changes in my personality traits, that is, in my dispositional properties: you notice that now I’m gloomy, whereas I used to be cheerful and sparky, and so on.
