Scientific thought is deeply invested in the persistence of things.
Entities may interact, transform, decay, or combine — but something must remain the same. An electron, a gene, a species, a system, a state: whatever else changes, identity is expected to endure.
When it does not, discomfort follows.
Identity as Silent Requirement
Identity is rarely foregrounded as an assumption. It operates instead as a background necessity.
Measurement presumes that what is measured before and after remains, in some sense, identical. Explanation presumes that causes and effects belong to the same thing across time. Laws presume that what they govern persists as the same kind of entity under varying conditions.
Without identity, comparison collapses.
And so identity is protected.
Permitted Change
Scientific descriptions are generous with change — provided it is change of state, not change of being.
A system may evolve continuously. It may transition discretely. It may fluctuate stochastically. It may even bifurcate.
But these are all framed as changes of something.
The identity of the thing itself is preserved as a condition of intelligibility.
Where Non-Identity Appears
Non-identity enters scientific thought in subtle, destabilising ways:
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when a system cannot be re-identified across scales
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when temporal evolution does not preserve state equivalence
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when individuation depends on context or interaction
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when boundaries shift under description
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when what counts as the “same” entity depends on how it is described
In these moments, identity is no longer given.
It must be negotiated.
The Usual Response
When non-identity threatens coherence, scientific thought tends to respond by stabilising identity elsewhere:
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at a deeper level
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in underlying variables
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in invariant structures
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in conserved quantities
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in abstract mathematical objects
Identity is displaced rather than relinquished.
What cannot be preserved phenomenally is preserved ontologically.
The Cost of Preservation
This manoeuvre restores explanatory continuity — but at a price.
By insisting that something must remain identical, scientific thought often obscures the role of description in producing stability. Identity appears as a feature of the world rather than as an effect of construal.
The question “what is the same?” is treated as prior to description, rather than as answered by it.
Relational Identity
Relational ontology reverses this priority.
Identity is not a primitive. It is an outcome.
What counts as the same entity depends on the cut by which a phenomenon is articulated — the relations made salient, the contrasts drawn, the scale adopted, the purposes enacted.
And persistence is always partial.
Non-Identity Without Collapse
To accept non-identity is not to deny regularity or stability. It is to refuse the demand that stability be absolute.
An entity may be sufficiently identical for one construal and not for another. It may persist across some transformations and not others. It may be re-identified without being fully preserved.
Why Non-Identity Is Intolerable
Non-identity threatens a powerful intuition: that the world consists of things which are what they are independently of how they are taken up.
If identity depends on construal, then the idea of a fully determinate world “in itself” becomes unstable.
What persists is not substance, but coherence under constraint.
This is difficult to accept.
Identity and Explanation
Explanations often promise to tell us what something really is. Non-identity undermines this promise.
If an entity does not remain fully itself across contexts, then no single description can exhaust it. Explanation becomes local, situated, perspectival.
The Refusal Revisited
The intolerance of non-identity mirrors the intolerance of incompleteness.
In both cases, scientific thought resists the idea that something essential may not be fully preservable: not total description, not stable identity.
And in both cases, the resistance takes the form of ontological reinforcement.
Non-Identity as Condition
Relational ontology does not resolve non-identity. It lives with it.
Entities are not self-identical substances traversing time. They are patterns of constraint that hold — provisionally, contextually, relationally.
What Follows
If identity is not given, and incompleteness is structural, then the final intolerance emerges naturally.
Scientific thought struggles not only with perspective, incompleteness, and non-identity — but with the idea that no single perspective can reconcile them.
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