Abstract
Identity claims often look nonsensical because they apparently declaredistinct things to be identical. I argue that this appearance is notjust an artefact of grammar. We should be fictionalists about such claims,seeing them against the background of speakers' pretense that their wordssecure reference to a plurality of objects that are then declared to beidentical from within the pretense. I argue that it is the resultinginterpretative tension – arising from the fact that two things cannever be identical – that allows us to understand the real point ofsuch statements. This view also offers a new solution to Fege's puzzleof the informativeness of identity statements.
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Kroon, F. Fictionalism and the informativeness of identity. Philosophical Studies 106, 197–225 (2001). https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013397112078
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1013397112078