Haecceitism and Symmetry-Breaking: Things, Time, and Powers

According to anti-haecceitism, facts about particular things are modally fixed by qualitative matters. According to qualitativism, such facts are metaphysically second-rate, perhaps because grounded in qualitative matters. Qualitativism seems to imply anti-haecceitism, so objections to the latter threaten the former. The most powerful sort of apparent counterexample to anti-haecceitism, I think, consists in a pair of situations that seem the same, and qualitatively symmetric, for a stretch of time, but that differ in how that symmetry breaks. I examine this sort of candidate counterexample in depth, and argue that the prospects for resisting it are heavily sensitive to broader metaphysical considerations, specifically ones about ontology, time, and causation. So, anti-haecceitism’s and qualitativism’s prospects are heavily sensitive to such considerations.