Elisa Paganini

Williams (2012) recently proposed the Normative Silence model of Indeterminacy in order to account for a single phenomenon running through all cases of indeterminacy and to reach consensus on the correct epistemic attitude to adopt towards borderline cases of paradigmatically vague predicates. Williams’s Normative Silence model says there is no general normative rule governing God’s and humans’ belief attitudes towards indeterminacies. I claim instead that human rationality and philosophical inquiry require general normative rules leading our belief attitudes towards indeterminacies and that God’s belief attitudes are more difficult to define than Williams assumes.

Frege's puzzle about identity sentences has long challenged many philosophers to find a solution to it but also led other philosophers to object that the evidential datum it is grounded on is false. The present work is an elaboration of this second kind of reaction: it explains why Frege's puzzle seems to resist the traditional objection, giving voice to different and more elaborated presentations of the evidential datum, faithful to the spirit but not to the letter of Frege's puzzle. The final outcome is negative, no satisfactory formulation of the evidential datum is found and Frege's puzzle is challenged until a better formulation of it is found.