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    Frege's puzzle about identity shows that 'Hesperus is Pho... — Carmelics
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    Challenges→Sentences must signify more than just the understandings of their constituent terms

    Frege's puzzle about identity shows that 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' and 'Hesperus is Hesperus' differ in cognitive significance despite sharing the same worldly referents.

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    1 reason for
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    Reasons For

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    Reason for
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    • 1.Learning that Hesperus is Phosphorus provides genuinely new information, whereas learning Hesperus is Hesperus is trivial and uninformative.
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    • 2.Cognitive significance tracks epistemic value: identity statements with different cognitive significance enable different knowledge acquisitions.
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    • 3.Names can have different senses or modes of presentation even when co-referring, explaining why identical referents yield different cognitive effects.
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    Reasons Against

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    • 1.Cognitive significance reflects psychology and empirical discovery, not semantics; both statements express the same metaphysical fact identically.
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    • 2.If identity is a relation, then 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' and 'Hesperus is Hesperus' have identical truth-conditions and semantic content by transitivity.
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    • 3.Differences in informativeness depend on speaker knowledge, not the statements themselves; the puzzle conflates epistemology with semantic meaning.
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    Related

    Cognitive significance reflects psychology and empirical discovery, not semantic...Cognitive significance tracks epistemic value: identity statements with differen...Differences in informativeness depend on speaker knowledge, not the statements t...If identity is a relation, then 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' and 'Hesperus is Hesper...
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    Learning that Hesperus is Phosphorus provides genuinely new information, whereas...Names can have different senses or modes of presentation even when co-referring,...Sentences must signify more than just the understandings of their constituent te...

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    2 (1 for, 1 against)
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