engleski

The Metalinguistic View of Identity Statements

Departing from standard Fregean/descriptivist and direct reference treatments of identity statements, and related informativeness and substitutivity failure puzzles, a number of authors argued that identity statements have metalinguistic content or metalinguistic truth conditions. To say that Cicero is Tully, according to them, amounts to saying something as: names ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ refer to the same thing ; and it is true that Cicero is Tully iff names ‘Cicero’ and ‘Tully’ refer to the same thing. In my talk I consider a number of arguments against the thesis that identity statements have metalinguistic content, if such content is to be taken as their propositional or semantic content. In doing so I side with direct reference theorists, and claim that an identity statement ‘a is a, ’ and its pair ‘a is b’(where ‘a’ and ‘b’ are coreferential singular terms), have the same propositional content: every identity statement says that a particular object is self-identical, and what they say is true iff the particular object stands in identity relation (to itself and no other object). As for the informativeness and substitutivity failure puzzles, I place them outside the domain of semantics, and adopt a weakened version of the metalinguistic view to deal with them. According to it identity statements do have metalinguistic content, and the puzzles arise in virtue of it, but their metalinguistic content is not their propositional content, and as such it has nothing to do with their truth conditions. That a is b would be true even if singular terms ‘a’ and ‘b’ never existed ; without coreferential singular terms, however, identity statements would never extend our knowledge, nor would we be in a position to consistently/rationally consent to‘F(a)’ and discard at the same time ‘F(b).’ We can consistently believe that ‘F(a)’ says something true, and ‘F(b)’ something false, although we cannot but to believe that F(b)if we believe that F(a) (given ‘a’ and ‘b’ are coreferential).

metalinguistic view; identity statements

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