 On this reading, the appeal to Leibniz's law would be legitimate (modulo any concerns about the status of modal properties) and one could rely on the truth of (30) and (31) (i.e., (31b)) to conclude that Tibbles is distinct from the relevant lump of feline tissue. However, there is no obvious reason why (31) should be regarded as true on this reading. That is, there is no obvious reason to suppose that the lump of feline tissue that in the actual world constitutes Tail and the rest of Tibbles's body—that lump of feline tissue that is now resting on the carpet—cannot survive the annihilation of Tail. Indeed, it would appear that any reason in favor of this claim vis-à-vis the truth of (30) would have to presuppose the distinctness of the entities in question, so no appeal to Leibniz's law would be legitimate to determine the distinctess (on pain of circularity). This is not to say that the putative counterexample to (29) is wrong-headed. But it requires genuine metaphysical work to establish it and it makes the rejection of extensionality, and with it the rejection of the Strong Supplementation principle (P.5), a matter of genuine philosophical controversy. (Similar remarks would apply to any argument intended to reject extensionality on the basis of competing modal intuitions regarding the possibility of mereological rearrangement, rather than mereological change, as with the flowers example. On a de re reading, the claim that a bunch of flowers could not survive rearrangement of the parts—while the aggregate of the individual flowers composing it could—must be backed up by a genuine metaphysical theory about those entities. For more on this general line of defense on behalf of (29), see e.g. Lewis 1971: 204ff, Jubien 1993: 118ff, and Varzi 2000: 291ff. See also King's 2006 reply to Fine 2003 for a more general diagnosis of the semantic mechanisms at issue here.)