Rigidity And Content

The project of giving a philosophical explication of this notion is no different in the above respect from other philosophical explications. Simply describing ordinary usage of locutions such as “what John said'will certainly not lead to any sort of theoretically fruitful concept. However, completely abandoning any pretheoretic notion of content may leave us with nothing about which to theorize fruitfully." I begin this section with an attempt to flesh " For instance, it has been argued that onr ordinary intnition that “Hesperus is Phosphorus and “Hesperus is Hesperus' say different things cannot be preserved on systematic, reconstructed notion of meaning. But if it could be shown that onr ordinary intuition that “Bill Clinton is President" and “2+ 2= 4” say different things also cannot be preserved, we would view the result as casting doubt on the very project of systematically characterizing a notion of content.