2 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: /r/philosophy Open Discussion Thread | February 10, 2025
I’m a linguistics graduate student and I’m getting into semantics and the philosophy of language. I’m reading a paper involving Mills, Frege, and Russell’s views of references.
The paper presents Frege’s “concern about identity statements” as:
1a. My next door neighbor is our district representative.
1b. a=b
2a. My next door neighbor is my next door neighbor.
2b. a=a
The paper presents this as a problem of “why, if identity statements are simply about their referents, are statements like 1a not as obvious as statements like 2a, which has the form 2b?”
I’m not sure why this is a “concern” or “problem”. If I’m not mistaken, is 2a simply not a tautology? I get that 1a can change in the future (and become a≠b) but it’s currently true.
The paper goes on to refer to Frege’s distinction between sense and reference and how “Frege used the concept of sense to solve his problem with identity statements.”
I’m sure I’m missing something, but I’m not really understanding what the “problem” is or why it requires a “solution” or why/how Frege’s “sense” solves it.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you.
Comment by Electrical_Shoe_4747 at 12/02/2025 at 09:52 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
This is a very interesting topic.
So think about it this way. Before Venus was "discovered" to be the planet Venus, people thought it was 2 different stars: the Morning Star and the Evening Star .
Now, what is the reference of "the Morning Star"? Why, it's the planet Venus, of course. What is the reference of "the Evening Star"? It is also the planet Venus. And yet, if you told someone "the Morning Star is the Evening Star", once upon a time they would have disagreed with you!
And it's not like the two terms changed references when it was discovered that they're both the planet Venus. Their reference was always the same thing, and yet people did not realise that it was the same thing.
Now, suppose I discover that the Morning Star is Venus, but not the Evening Star. Consider that this proposition is true: (i) "I believe that the Morning Star is Venus." If I don't know that the Morning Star is the same thing as the the Evening Star, then this proposition can also be true: "I believe that the Evening Star is not Venus." But if "Morning Star" just means "Evening Star", then that proposition is equivalent to (ii) "I don't believe that the Morning Star is Venus.".
But (i) and (ii) contradict each other! They'd be a genuine, real-life contradiction!
So. The solution is to give names senses. The sense of "Morning Star" is "the star that appears in the morning", or something like that. And by factoring senses into our truth-conditions, we can avoid such contradictions.
I hope this helps!
Comment by Hot_Experience_8410 at 12/02/2025 at 08:13 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Good question. It would depend upon what you consider to be a tautological. Personally I would liken it to noting a tautology is tautological in the sense that it is consisting of more than one parting from itself, that most commonly being the definition, or what we more often refer to as meaning. 2a is great because it creates a place holder then proceeds to fill it with itself. Indeed, much can be revealed by tautology, however, often even more so from how we arrive at the understanding that a statement is tautological (circling back to my initial perspective).