Abstract
I will argue that Frege’s puzzle arises only in taking into consideration the cognizer’s viewpoint. Although this sounds trivial, it triggers some important consequences. In particular, Frege’s puzzle has nothing to do with the notion of identity. For, the puzzle rests on whether the speaker/hearer (or writer/reader) conceives the names flanking the identity-sign to be co-referential or not (independently of whether they are de facto co-referential). I will show how Frege’s attempted solution in the Begriffsschrift can be rescued and how this may not conflict with the solution Frege proposes in introducing the sense/reference distinction. To do so, though, we should recognize that Frege worked with different (and somewhat conflicting) notions of content and that he assumed that only a single content expressed by an utterance should encompass all the information conveyed by a statement. In questioning this assumption Frege’s puzzle or a Frege-inspired puzzle can be addressed and understood from a different perspective.
About the author
Eros Corazza was educated at the universities of Geneva, Indiana and Stanford. His main interests concern the philosophy of language/mind, linguistics, and cognitive sciences. His recent publications comprise Reflecting the Mind: Indexicality and Quasi-Indexicality (Oxford University Press), book chapters and articles in: Analysis, Philosophical Studies, Synthese, Mind & Language, Journal of Linguistics, Journal of Semantics, Journal of Philosophical Logic, Philosophical & Phenomenological Research, Dialectica, Erkenntnis, Journal of Pragmatics, and Pragmatics & Cognition.
Acknowledgements
For comments and/or discussions on a previous version of this paper I would like to thank Peter Bowie, Kepa Korta, David Matheson, John Perry, María de Ponte, Marco Ruffino, Ludovic Soutif, the audience of the UNILOG2015 conference (Istanbul, Turkey, July 2015) and two referees for this journal. Research for this paper has been partly supported by a grant from the Spanish Minister: FFI2015-63719-P (MINECO/FEDER) and the Basque Government (IT1032-16).
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