A Tale of Two Tattoos (Dale)

I love philosophy majors. The best of them almost always develop a nerdy and warped sense of humor – and I mean that in the best way.

These two young ladies, recent alumnas of our department, decided to get complementary tattoos. (Sober, they swear!)

In each case, the tattoo artist left off the two initial universal quantifiers: AxAy (I can’t find the symbol codes for the upside down A representing the universal quantifier – so please imagine those A’s upside down.) They would read: For any x whatsoever and for any y whatsoever…

Now to the tattoos. “F” is supposed to be, either a predicate or a property. On the right tattoo (wrist) the right, closing parentheses is just out of view.

One of the tattoos says something nearly all philosophers agree is true (a rarity!) while the other is held to be false by many. Here’s your homework, dear reader: Which, and why? (Hint #1: one is called the Identity of Indiscernibles, and the others is the Indiscenibility of Identicals. Hint #2: I’ve preached quite a lot about the true on on this blog.)

While you’re thinking, the best and funniest song ever written about tattoos.

Helpful little reminder there at the end.

Also, there’s the Live at Leeds version, with a funky recent video added to it.