The Ship of Theseus

by Hap Rocketto 

Over the past several months I have been engaged in writing a history of the Black Hawk Rifle Club, a 75 year old shooting organization of which I am a member. One of the recurrent themes was the number of national titles the club has accumulated in its competitive career.

The club has used various names to delineate one team from another when entered in the same match such at the National Smallbore Rifle Championships. The club, being named after one of the great Indian chiefs, tends to use names easily associated with the great war chief of the Sauk tribe of central Illinois. The best team is usually named Chiefs, and then there are the Arrows, on occasion there was an all female team called Squaws and a junior team with Papoose as its handle. There is also a long string of teams simply named Black Hawk.

Paul Nordquist, one of the club members working with me on the project, had an interesting question in regard to teams. He asked, “The number of teams that have swept a championship; that is they won both the metallic and anysight team matches in a single phase, raises an interesting philosophical question. For example, if the Army Blue Team wins both matches in a phase, but switches a shooter to do so, is it the same team because the name has remained the same or is it a different team because it has a different composition?”

All I wanted to do was to write an interesting and informative history of the club and here I was, sidetracked by philosophical dialog. It reminded me of a time when I was in the pits at Fort Benning and engaged in a similar philosophical discussion with my teammate Roger McQuiggan. We were debating back and forth about some esoteric point of existence and Roger had taken the Teleological argument which states that anything complex must be designed by a great designer. I, on the other hand, elected to argue from the more controversial Ontological point of view which states that if it can be imagined it can exist.

We yammered back in forth for sometime as the Pit NCO looked on very quietly with a bemused expression on his face. At last Roger turned to him and said, Sarge, we aren’t getting any where here. What do you think?” The old timer looked at Roger and then at me, shifted his Copenhagen, spit into the dust at his feet, and looked up to say, “I guess it all depends on if you are on the outside looking in or on the inside looking out.” And that pretty much sums up the state of this argument which has been going on for at least two millennia.

To get back to the problem at hand I thought about it a bit and came up on the horns of a dilemma. Yes, I thought, they must be the same team because the name is the same. I also thought no, because each team had different constituent parts so it can’t be the same. A third thought which crossed my mind is that nothing easy for the shooting historian.

My brother Steve, also a Black Hawk, was, given a copy of the draft so that he might offer constructive criticism. When he reached the appendix on team victories he casually commented, “I wonder how many of these teams that doubled in the same year were the same?”

My jaw dropped for Steve has both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Philosophy and I feared the worst. Reluctantly I told him about the exchange that I had had with Nordquist over the same question. The faraway look in his eyes told me that Steve was mentally shuffling his notes and preparing to launch into an elegant and exquisitely detailed discourse on the subject. Sighing I dropped my head into my hands and braced myself for this would be a bone which he would gnaw upon for some time. This turn of event would mean only two things, my store of knowledge would increase and the completion of the project would be delayed.

His opening salvo was, “Have you not read Plutarch’s Life of Theseus?” Knowing that he had, and probably in the original Latin, I replied that I had not.

“Well then,” he went on quoting verbatim, in English thank my lucky stars, from the work, “The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place.” Steve continued his Phil 101 lecture by telling me that Plutarch then asked if the ship is the same ship if, over time, it were entirely replaced, piece by piece. To make things more confusing Thomas Hobbs came along centuries later and asked if the original pieces were saved and reassembled which ship would be the genuine Ship of Theseus? It is a classic paradox problem.

Desperate to move on I interrupted his exposition and for that he looked at me sternly, as if I should have been taking notes or something. I told him that Nordquist and I solved the problem to our satisfaction. For better or worse we agreed that, for our purpose, we would only consider a team the same if all of the members of both teams were the same. “Pragmatic, to be sure, but not good philosophy” Steve opined with a dismissive shake of his head.

He quickly brightened and bubbled out. “Do you know,” he said with a gleeful conspiratorial wink, “that the same paradox under different guises is also called ‘Heraclitus’ River’, or ‘Plato’s Carriage’, or ‘Locke’s Socks’, or ‘George Washington’s Axe’? Maybe I can get into the journals with a paper on the subject entitled ‘Rocketto’s Rifle Teams’?”