Stage Names: Towards a Stage-Theoretical Semantics for Persons' Names

Four-dimensionalist accounts of personal persistence according to which personal names are temporally rigid produce counterintuitive results in branching cases. I sketch a semantics for the stage theory according to which names refer indeterminately over reference classes of stages and, in branching cases, select different reference classes at different times. Where fission occurs there is one person before fission, afterwards two people each of whom 'were' that person, and no answer to the question of how many people there are 'all along'. This account produces a more intuitive reading of fission cases than standard perdurantist accounts. Arguably, in understanding personal persistence if you are a four-dimensionalist you should be a stage theorist rather than a worm theorist.