Ruoyun Yu
King’s College London
In most recent discussions of Frege’s Puzzle it is treated as a puzzle about substitution failure in attitude reports (e.g., Kripke, 1979; Salmon, 1986; Soames, 1987; Sosa, 1996; Braun, 1998). The puzzle, so construed, is supposed to be solved when we have a plausible answer of why such substitutions go wrong (e.g., Carnap, 1947; Richard, 1990; Crimmins & Perry, 1989; Chalmers, 2002). However, in Frege’s own work the puzzle is developed without appeal to attitude reports: first and foremost it concerns the logical properties of identity statements. In my talk I will argue that the identity version of the puzzle is explanatorily fundamental, and the attitude version is derivative. This priority has methodological consequences. When it is not respected, proposed solutions risk either presupposing the very phenomenon they aim to explain, or redescribing it in more theoretically burdensome terms. I develop this diagnostic against Williamson’s recent proposals (2021, 2024) as an illustrative case of the former failure, and argue that without a solution to identity version of Frege’s Puzzle it is difficult to characterise his theory at all. Against Unnsteinsson (2019), I further argue that the scope of the puzzle is wider than typically assumed: it is not confined to isolated problem cases, but is rooted in the structure of inference itself.
Chair: tba
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SOPhiA 2026 