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    Carmelics

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    LoyalLoyalJusticeJustice
    Made withinDC&Austin
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    Home/Original/inverse
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    Inverse View

    It is not the case that Frege's puzzle about identity shows that 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' and 'Hesperus is Hesperus' differ in cognitive significance despite sharing the same worldly referents.

    ?Set your confidence on the premises below to see your aggregate.

    Reasons For

    1 perspective
    Reason for
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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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    Reasons Against

    1 perspective
    Reason against
    ?
    • 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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