Frege’s Puzzle: Much Ado about Nothing?

Abstract

In her paper “Can Frege Pose Frege’s Puzzle”, Stavroula Glezakos argues for the claim that, unless one presupposes the theoretical notion of sense, there is no in-principle epistemic divide between sentences of the form “a=a” and “a=b”. It would follow that Frege’s puzzle cannot be used to argue in favour of senses, as Frege has done, on pain of circularity. Here I argue that a criterion of name identity based on the notion of explicit co-reference can be specified that does not presuppose the notion of sense. I show how such criterion is plausibly implicitly at work in setting up the puzzle, and that it can be deployed to rescue Frege from the accusation of circularity.