There is an ongoing argument across social media and some areas of academia that sometimes gets very, very nasty indeed, and I'm not going to dip my toes into it here, or even name it. If you know what it is, you know, and if you don't, it won't matter much to what I'm about to consider. One of the areas of dispute has to do with the intersection between "identity" and - for want of a better phrase - material reality (or facticity, if you're so inclined). A lot of people take it as clear that the two are very different; hence one cannot identify or stipulate certain facts about the world into being other than they are. Age is a paradigmatic example of that. Having been on this planet a shade over 42 years, I can't be anything other than 42, for the simple reason that that's what I am.
Not so fast, says Joona Räsänen in the JME, in what appears not actually to be meant as a reductio ad absurdum. There is, he thinks, a case to be made for legally changing one's age.
Unfortunately, as we'll see, it's not a very strong case. (If I'm so sure of my position, why not write it up as a paper in its own right? Well, because I don't think it takes long enough to dismiss the argument to generate a paper, even for a journal with as low a word limit as the JME.)
Not so fast, says Joona Räsänen in the JME, in what appears not actually to be meant as a reductio ad absurdum. There is, he thinks, a case to be made for legally changing one's age.
Unfortunately, as we'll see, it's not a very strong case. (If I'm so sure of my position, why not write it up as a paper in its own right? Well, because I don't think it takes long enough to dismiss the argument to generate a paper, even for a journal with as low a word limit as the JME.)
