 In this case, the relativist, as so far understood, may seem to enjoy no advantage over the absolutist. The problem is not clearly one of reconciling LL with ordinary judgments of identity, and the advantage afforded by RI does not seem applicable. Griffin (1977), for example, relying on RI, claims that the original and remodeled ship are the same ship but not the same collection of planks, whereas the reassembled ship is the same collection of planks as the original but not the same ship. This simply doesn’t resolve the problem. The problem is that the reassembled and remodeled ships have, prima facie, equal claim to be the original and so the bald claims that the reassembled ship is not—and the remodeled ship is—the original are unsupported. The problem is that of reconciling the intuition that certain small changes (replacement of a single part or small portion) preserve identity, with the problem illustrated by the sandals example of §2.5. It turns out, nevertheless, that the problem \(is\) one of dealing with the excesses of LL. To resolve the problem, we need an additional level of relativity. To motivate this development, consider the following abstract counterpart of the sandals example: