AAP 2026 CONFERENCE

Debunking arguments aim to show that our beliefs do not track the world, by identifying a certain etiology that confers negative epistemic status to our beliefs. For instance, we believe that murder is wrong. Debunker comes in by stating that we have such a belief because we evolved to belief that murder is wrong given that it is maladaptive. Since that is the case, our moral beliefs do not stand for moral facts. In this paper I aim to put forward a novel type of debunking arguments—the one that pertains to identity. Roughly, I claim that we have intuitions about what makes objects different from other objects and that such intuitions can be debunked. The first intuition—the unity intuition—states that we think that objects are singular if they have enough unity. The second intuition—the spatial boundary intuition—states that we think that objects are singular up to the point where they meet unoccupied space. The claim is that, analogously to a moral case, we evolved to have such intuitions which makes them epistemically problematic. If it weren’t for evolution, we wouldn’t think that objects are singular, nor we would have intuitions about what makes them singular. The upshot is that we have a reason to suspend or reduce credence to our beliefs about identity.