IDENTIFICATION AND DOING WITHOUT IT, II: VISUAL EVIDENCE FOR PINPOINTING IDENTITY. HOW ALEXANDER WAS FOUND OUT: PURPOSEFUL ACTION, ENLISTING SUPPORT, ASSUMED IDENTITY, AND RECOGNITION. A GOAL-DRIVEN FORMAL ANALYSIS

Abstract

Identifying a person's likeness is made more intricate by cultural factors. In the upper Middle Ages, a literary account would have (so the Hebrew Chronicle of Ahimaaz , Italy, 1054) a father recognize his son even when the bewitched son's likeness is, alas, asinine, the enabling factor being (like in Early Modern narratives) the call of the blood. Even those disliking the field of "literature and law" making its entry at schools of law will hopefully find merit in this article, as it shows how an intricate story of action and epistemic states can be set in formulae. My formalism is for a sample case from fiction, namely, a medieval literary text concerning a person being identified based on a portrait, notwithstanding that person's claim of a different identity. The Middle English Kyng Alisaunder relates that while in India, Alexander the Great passed himself for somebody else (General Antigonus) when a local prince visited him to seek his support, yet Queen Candace called the trick on the evidence of a portrait. Representational features involved in the formulae include: beliefs; seeing to it that something happens; setting and achieving a goal; taking an assumed identity; perceptions by various sensorial modes; communicating a proposition or giving an order; giving testimony about perceptual evidence or about one's own past actions, beliefs, and goals; as well as having a portrait made by somebody else so that a third party could be recognized on its evidence.