Informative Identities: A Challenge for Frege's Puzzle

Abstract

Frege's puzzle about identity sentences has long challenged many philosophers to find a solution to it but also led other philosophers to object that the evidential datum it is grounded on is false. The present work is an elaboration of this second kind of reaction: it explains why Frege's puzzle seems to resist the traditional objection, giving voice to different and more elaborated presentations of the evidential datum, faithful to the spirit but not to the letter of Frege's puzzle. The final outcome is negative, no satisfactory formulation of the evidential datum is found and Frege's puzzle is challenged until a better formulation of it is found.

Frege’s Puzzle Is Here to Stay: Triviality and Informativity in Natural Languages

“…The syntactic notion of name coordination we are invoking is not wholly original. Indeed, it can be seen as a restriction to proper names of what has been variously called 'strict coreference' (Fine 2007) 13 , 'grammatically determined coreference' (Fiengo and May 2006), 'explicit coreference' (Taylor 2015), and 'de jure codesignation' (Pryor 2017), and 'de jure coreference' (Pinillos 2011, Recanati 2012, 2016. All of these authors had a common goal in mind: characterizing that relation which holds between two representations when their co-reference is given for free, so to say.…”

“…As we will see, given the messiness of natural languages, it is particularly hard to substantiate that notion. In sections 4 and 5, we experiment with several candidates, and end up agreeing with both Glezakos (2009) and Paganini (2016) that most of these won't do (including the notion of typographical identity, sameness of generic names, sameness of common-currency names, and sameness of private names).…”