Hesperus and Phosphorus: Sense, Pretense, and Reference

Abstract

In On Sense and Reference, surrounding his discussion of how we describe what people say and think, identity is Frege's first stop and his last. We will follow Frege's plan here, but we will stop also in the land of make-believe. Identity challenges reflection, says Frege. By identity Frege intends whatever it is we attribute when we say, for instance, that Hesperus is the same thing as Phosphorus. It can seem odd, he says, to think of identity as a relation between things, for, what interest could attach to a thing's being itself? It is odd, too, to think of identity as the relation that holds between different names of a thing, for then the statement that Hesperus is Phosphorus would be held to concern neither Hesperus nor Phosphorus, but only the name 'Hesperus' and the name 'Phosphorus' (and this would alienate the identity statement from such apparent kin as the statement that Hesperus is the same size as Phosphorus). Frege's resolution of the dilemma is well known: intermediate between a name and the thing named is a mode of presentation of the thing; the name expresses that way of thinking about the thing. A true identity statement like 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is not trivial because the entity that in the statement is said to be identical to itself is conceived differently under the two names: the names 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' express different modes of presentation of a single object. Russell, too, finds his reflection challenged by identity. In The Philosophy of Logical Atomism he writes: