Identifying Primitive Individuals

According to a widespread contention, individuals are among the basic building blocks of the world. The contention, however, raises a perennial problem. If individuals are basic, they cannot be fully accounted for in terms of their empirically detectable qualities. But then, how can we detect, or know, or identify, individuals? Shamik Dasgupta has influentially argued that considerations along these lines, together with a lesson from the history of physics, should make us reject any picture on which individuals are basic constituents of reality. In this paper, I defend such a picture against Dasgupta’s argument.