Taking Frege's name in vain
Erkenntnis 39 (2):167 - 190 (1993)
| Abstract | A widely held view about Fregean Sense has it that the determination of a sign's referent by the sign's sense is achieved viasatisfaction: the sense specifies a condition (or set of conditions) and the referent is that entity, if any, which uniquely satisfies that (set of) condition(s). This is usually held in conjunction with the claim that the sense is existentially and qualitatively independent of the referent: if the referent did not exist, or did not uniquely satisfy the sense, the sense would still exist and would still specify the same condition(s) that it actually does (and might determine a different referent than its actual one). Proponents of this view give several reasons for holding it. I describe these reasons and argue that they are not convincing. More generally, I try to show that the notion of satisfaction has no useful application within Frege's system. I then suggest an alternative account of the determination of a referent by a sense that I think is truer to Frege and more illuminating. Compared to the satisfaction view, my account construes determination as a more naturalistic and epistemically real relation between speakers and things in the world. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | No categories specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,865 |
| External links |
 |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesWolfgang Carl (1994). Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference: Its Origins and Scope. Cambridge University Press.
Michael Nelson (2008). Frege and the Paradox of Analysis. Philosophical Studies 137 (2):159 - 181.
Robert May (2006). The Invariance of Sense. Journal of Philosophy 103 (3):111-144.
Carlo Penco (2003). Frege: Two Theses, Two Senses. History and Philosophy of Logic 24 (2):87-109.
Cheng-Chih Tsai (2009). Senses of Compositionality and Compositionality of Senses. Linguistic and Philosophical Investigations 8:86-104.
Barbara Fultner (2005). Referentiality in Frege and Heidegger. Philosophy and Social Criticism 31 (1):37-52.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2009-01-28Total downloads4 ( #180,404 of 556,803 )Recent downloads (6 months)1 ( #64,847 of 556,803 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
