The Puzzle of Informative Identity: A Descriptivist Response

Abstract

The puzzle of informative identity has been a widely debated logical issue for a long time. To be more specific, the problem of how people should define the exact referent of identity statements such as “A is B” remains mysterious. When the same object is referred to by different names, this kind of identity statement seems a priori and non-informative. In addition, defining identity statements as connections between “names” would mean that they are relations between symbols. This nature of identity statements makes them an urgent philosophical problem. This paper argues that Bertrand Russell’s descriptivist theory provides a resolution to Gottlob Frege’s puzzle of informative identity statements by fundamentally dissolving its core assumptions, rather than merely offering an alternative argument. This paper reaches this conclusion by justifying Russellian descriptivism’s superiority over Frege’s metaphysical theory, which involves sense and reference. This paper defends descriptivism against Kripke’s objections by altering the modal functors such as “necessarily” and “possibly” in a sentence in natural languages to show that the “scope” of a sentence is controllable.