 But there are real, famous historical issues about identity that lead to disagreements about the relation between essential sortals and identity. Some philosophers believe that there is a unique universal identity relation which holds, or doesn’t, independently of any sortals. Others argue that identity is always relative to a sortal because we may have a statue of Lincoln which is a different statue than one of Caesar even though the lump of bronze from which the first was made is the same lump of bronze that constitutes the second. So in this case, the sortals “statue” and “lump of bronze” give different answers to the identity question.