Frege's Puzzle

Abstract

A PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOLUTION? Despite the great promise and intellectual rigor of its founding, in recent years the dominant influence of the analytic tradition in Anglo-American philosophy has begun to weaken. While it remains a rich source of excellent scholarship, the remarkable achievements that distinguished the movement in the early part of the twentieth century have not been matched by more contemporary efforts to build upon those successes. Furthermore, the bulk of the aforementioned scholarship has been devoted to trying to untangle the nest of logical difficulties encountered by their forerunners, with comparatively little to offer in the way of fresh insight. As a consequence, Anglo-American philosophy is gradually drifting away from the traditional analytic approach into pragmatic or post-modern alternatives, or more recently, ceding its ground to cognitive science. Among those phenomena extensively explored by analytic philosophers is that of language. In fact, the philosophy of language is often taught as a topic exclusive to the analytic domain. However, those familiar with the last century of analytic thought cannot help but be somewhat troubled by its claim to offer a "clarification" of this phenomenon. For within this tradition, ordinary linguistic phenomena the clarification of which would seem to be central to any philosophical account of language (notably, those of reference, naming, and identification) have yet to be explained to anyone's full satisfaction. In fact, in many instances they have been radically reinterpreted (as by Bertrand Russell) or dismissed as "mentalistic excrescences" (as by Willard Quine). It has been argued that the insights of the later Wittgenstein helped us to escape the paradoxes that such philosophies had led us into. But there is much debate as to whether Wittgenstein's approach genuinely unmasks false problems or illegitimately circumvents them. I will not engage that particular debate here. I would like instead to call attention to another way of looking at historically problematic linguistic phenomena. My specific concern is with the philosophical problems of identification and naming, and their intersection with the broader linguistic phenomenon of reference. I approach these problems here through one of the more resistant difficulties treated in the analytic literature, commonly known as "Frege's Puzzle" of informative identity statements. I hope to demonstrate how insights from Husserl's descriptive phenomenology can open up this problem and suggest other ways forward than those previously attempted within the analytic tradition. Gottlob Frege focused on the issue of informative identity statements in order to underscore the need to distinguish between sense and reference. The problem is simple, but not easily resolved. An example of an informative identity statement cited by Frege is: "the morning star is the evening star." The two phrases on either side of "is" have the same referent, namely, the planet Venus. Hence, the statement is true. But it is not thereby trivial, that is, it is not equivalent to the tautology "A is A." This is not simply because the expressions are phonetically different, but because they identify or "pick out" their common referent in different ways. As a result of this difference, one might be familiar with the morning star without realizing that it is the same object as the evening star. Thus the statement may qualify as a piece of valid astronomical knowledge. Frege demonstrates that this puzzle can also manifest itself with ordinary proper names, as when we substitute "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" in the above example.1 In these examples, it is the difference between the two names or expressions that is puzzling. For if the identity statement relating the expressions is true, then we are essentially denying any difference in what they express; that is, we are saying that the two terms are identical. But if we want to account for the fact that the statement's truth is not trivial but constitutive of knowledge, then we must admit some difference between the terms. …