Cognitive Value and Natural Language Proper Names

Abstract

In her “Can Frege Pose Frege’s Puzzle?”, Stavroula Glezakos claims that Frege cannot pose his puzzle without appealing to something like the theoretical notion of Sinn and so the so-called puzzle does not affect non- Fregeans and Fregeans should not be puzzled by it since it is their framework that both generates and explains it. But contrary to what Glezakos thinks, I argue in this paper that both Fregeans and non-Fregeans alike face a puzzle about true identity statements concerning proper names that can and should be posed given some idiosyncrasies of natural languages. Indeed, it seems that a successful theory of natural language proper names must appeal to Sinn-like entities to capture cognitive differences in true identity statements.