CARLO PENCO* SENSE AND LINGUISTIC MEANING: A SOLUTION TO THE BURGE-KRIPKE CONFLICT in Paradigmi, 3, 2013, pp. 75-89 1. Burge on Sense and Meaning When "Sinning Against Frege" was published in 1979 I thought it should have given a real turn in the discussion on Frege's ideas. Actually the impact was less then I imagined, and the problem was that – at the end of the story – Tyler Burge's interpretation should have posed a shadow on the direct reference theories and the Millean criticism of descriptivist theories of proper names, based on the criticism of the identification of Frege's notion of sense with linguistic meaning or connotation1. In fact Burge (1979) claims that the identification of Frege's notion of sense with the notion of linguistic meaning is a «basic misunderstanding» of Frege's work2. This claim implies that Fregean senses are not like Mill's connotations; therefore many direct-reference criticisms against Frege, which are grounded on Mill's claims that proper names have no connotation, lose their efficacy. Burge, in giving specifications3, apparently accepts at least the idea that sense is an aspect of meaning, in particular «the aspect of meaning relevant to fixing the truth value of sentences» (Burge, 1979, p. 213; (the pages are quoted from Burge (2005); this feature is the "harmless" part of the assimilation of sense and linguistic meaning; but this assimilation becomes dangerous when context dependence is concerned. Revisiting Burge (1979), after more than two decades of debate on indexicals, may help to better understand the originality and the limitation of his claims. The first example used by Burge to claim the difference between sense and linguistic meaning is a famous quotation from "Der Gedanke", where Frege says: [T] "[...] the time of utterance is part of the expression of the thought. If someone wants to say today what he expressed yesterday using the word 'today', he will replace the word with 'yesterday'. Although the thought is the same, its verbal expression must be different, in order that the change of sense which would otherwise be effected by the different time of utterance may be cancelled out" (Frege, 1918, p. 64). Here Frege – in anticipating the topic of context dependence – finds a problem in defining the thought as the sense of a sentence when the words alone in a sentence are not sufficient to express a complete thought. This problem seems to require an adjustment of his earlier views on sense4, and the solution to the problem compels a reading where sense cannot be identified with linguistic meaning. This is the consequence taken by Burge, who comments: indexical expressions with different meanings ("yesterday" and "today") may, in their respective contexts, be associated with the same sense"; besides the same indexical expression like "today" or "I" will change sense depending on the context of utterance, while keeping the same linguistic meaning. Burge concludes that «sense seems to vary independently of the meaning of indexicals» (Burge, *University of Genoa, Italy, penco@unige.it. A short version of this paper should have been given at the Wismar Conference on Frege (Penco, 2013), where I was unable to go. I wish to thank Diego Marconi, Filippo Domaneschi and Massimiliano Vignolo for comments on an earlier version of the paper, Pieranna Garavaso for her encouragment and remarks on the general approach and the audience of a talk held in Rome for the conference on Frege held in 2011 at the Università Roma Tre. 1 Kripke needs the identification of sense and linguistic meaning to justify his standard criticism of the descriptivist theory of proper names, based on the supposed confusion made by Frege between "giving the reference" and "giving the meaning" or "giving a synonym". However, Krikpe's criticism has also been at the origin of a new consideration of a tension between different roles played by the Fregean Sinn, starting with Dummett (1981, pp. 99ff; 126-129) who discusses cases in which we can see «Frege's failure to separate the different ingredients of his notion of sense» (that is the way in which the referent of an expression is given to us and its conventional significance). 2 My concern here is mainly on the critique Burge poses on the identification of sense and meaning; I will not discuss other worries on Burge's proposal of a proper metaphysical view of abstract entities. This last aspect has been much debated since Weiner (1995), but will be only indirectly considered here. Neither I will make any reference to the way in which Burge (2010) treats "perceptual modes of presentation" – a topic also developed by Recanati (2012, 2013) with the idea of nonlinguistic or perceptual modes of presentation as mental files – although there is a deep connection between the discussion of preceptual modes of presentation and the hints given in the 1979 paper. 3 See Burge (1990, footnote 4). 4 As Dummett (1973, pp. 384; 400) says, Frege should have said that the thought is not the sense of a sentence, but a sense of an utterance 2 1979, p. 215). Hence sense cannot be assimilated to linguistic meaning, but it is something independent of it: the sense of an indexical construction is «a timeless abstract entity that bears its relation to its denotation or referent in an eternal context-free manner»: senses are «there to be grasped» and determine their reference independently of the thinker's activity (p. 234). Burge is here attempting to "save" Fregean senses from less charitable attempts, like Perry (1977)5. However Burge himself, referring in footnote to Frege (1892), acknowledges a relevant problem: we have two different "epistemic perspectives" in saying or thinking "today is F" and saying (or thinking) "yesterday was F" on the subsequent day. In fact «Frege's primary motivation for introducing sense was to account for difference in cognitive value. Thus the thought expressed by the different utterances may be different, as are the senses associated with indexicals. There is no reason to think that when it came to indexicals, Frege forgot his own ground for postulating senses» (Burge, 1979, p. 216). On this ground one should therefore conclude that "today is F" and "yesterday was F" said the subsequent day express different senses (the same holds for "today is F" said at time t and "today is F" said at time t'). Therefore, the main argument to claim that sense is not linguistic meaning gives rise to a question that remains unanswered: [Q] If sense accounts for the difference in cognitive values, how is it possible that sentences that contain expressions with different cognitive values ("today is F" and "yesterday is F" said the subsequent day) express the same sense? Burge does not give an explicit answer to the question, but gives different suggestions remarking that Frege had a problem that he really never put into focus, that is the following tension or contrast: [C] There is a tension between two objectives that Frege had for his notion of sense: 1) Sense as a conceptual representation for the thinker, or as accounting for cognitive value. 2) Sense as uniquely determining the referents of linguistic expressions, or fixing the Bedeutung of semantically relevant expressions6. After denouncing the weakness of a proposal of postulating "special" senses for demonstratives, Burge works on the idea of the "context bound character of thoughts" and on the idea of a non-conceptual, contextdependent notion of intuition which is needed for Frege's treatment of indexicals7. How may this notion help individuating the sense of indexical expressions? Burge's suggestion is that, on the one hand, the same linguistic meaning may express different senses because of a substantive contribution of a noconceptual component used in different contexts and pointing towards different referents (different days); on the other hand different linguistic meanings may express the same sense given that the nonlinguistic component – the intuition of the day – is the same. Burge gives shortly also a formal suggestion, expressing an indexical thought with the aid of a complex demonstrative like "that G is F": here we have, according to Burge, an indexical application of the concept F to an entity which is described, but "not completely individuated" by the concept G. The indexical "that" should fill the gap of what is missing in the descriptive component, indicating a way to be acquainted with a non-descriptive sense, that is a way of giving the referent as if there were a demonstration introduced by the demonstrative "that" in the context: "a hearer can note the contexts in which indexicals are applied (rather than having an idiosyncratically associated concept) and can utilize his notes to find the intended referent" (Burge, 1979, p. 239). At the end of the paper (§ 4) I will use this original step taken by Burge to give a possible alternative to the usual discussion on Frege's theory of indexicals. A proper answer to question [Q], however, is still to be given, and the role of contrast [C] not completely clarified by the postulation of the notion of "intuition" (or, if we want "acquaintance") nor by the general 5I say "less charitable" because Perry (1977) sees an unavoidable problem in Frege's treatment of indexicals and gives an alternative theory to the Fregean one: the two sentences express different thoughts and refer to the same objective content – the same day – in two different ways (given by the different roles of the indexicals "today" and "yesterday"). Perry's view, although influential for Kripke's interpretation, claims that Frege had to give up some of his fundamental tenets, while Kripke tries to keep all Fregean fundamental tenets, rejecting what he explicilty says in [T]. 6 I merge here what Burge literally says in his 1979 paper and in his 1990 paper. We will come back on a better rendering of this contrast in §3, where we will look for a dissolution of the apparent alternative between two different readings of the Fregan passage [T] given by Burge and Kripke. 7 Similarly Yourgrau (1987, 2012) and Kripke (2008) claim, in different (and contrasting) ways, that Frege needs a concept of acquaintance to fulfill the needs of his notion of sense. Against the need of a Fregean "acquaintance" see Künne (2010). 3 suggestion of a non-conceptual component of the notion of Sinn. A wider analysis of the non-conceptual (or non-linguistic) component of the Fregean Sinn is developed by Saul Kripke (2008), in a way that is however very different from Burge's main ideas. 2. Kripke's Criticism of Burge and Question [Q] Facing question [Q] Kripke's answer is very similar to Perry (1977) and Dummett (1981): Frege was mistaken in saying that the two sentences ("today is F" and "yesterday is F" said the subsequent day) express the same sense, because it is hard «to see how to reconcile this assertion with his other doctrines», mainly compositionality principles (Kripke, 2008, p. 204). Consequently Kripke also claims that Burge is wrong in denying that sense is linguistic meaning: on one hand Frege never uses any specific notion of "meaning" and, having used the term "Bedeutung" (which is the standard German term for "meaning") as a technical term, he had only the term "Sinn" to speak of meaning8; on the other hand both Frege's literal claim of the sameness of the sense of the two utterances and Burge's interpretation of it apparently clash with the compositionality principle, given that the same sense should be constituted by the same component parts, and this apparently does not apply in the case described in [T]. In an alternative interpretation of [T] Kripke treats "today is F" as an ordered pair with a linguistic and a non-linguistic part, so to give the right place to Frege's insistence that time is part of the expression of the thought. In the ordered pair <L, t > "L" stands for the linguistic part (for instance "Today is F") and "t" stands for the time of the utterance. Here Kripke insists, as Burge in his 1977 paper, of the need of a nonconceptual (Burge) or non-linguistic (Kripke) component of the sense of an indexical. Given that Kripke criticized Burge's interpretation for not being able to recover compositionality, he needs to explicitly recover compositionality in his own interpretation; therefore Kripke has to show that each part of the expression, both linguistic and non-linguistic, must have sense and reference. But what are the sense and the reference of a non-linguistic part of the expression? Following his interpretation of Frege's theory of indirect speech, Kripke (2008, p. 202) says that to understand the idea that time is part of the expression of thought, the time must refer autonomously to itself. And the sense expressed by the nonverbal part in the ordered pair is the sense of autonymous designation: the speaker will be acquainted «both with the time of utterance [...] and he must be acquainted the Sinn as well, a Sinn of autonymous designation» (pp. 202-203). With this move Kripke recovers compositionality of thought: the linguistic meaning of "today" is invariant and different from the meaning of "yesterday", and the two thoughts are built from the senses of the component parts, including the times of the utterances. There is, however, a price to pay: the rejection of the explicit Fregean claim that "today is F" and "yesterday is F" (said on the subsequent day) express the same sense. According to Kripke's view, both the idea of ordered pairs with time as part of the expression of the thought and the idea that sense is identical to linguistic meaning forbid the Fregean claim: Frege should be plainly wrong. Are there other alternatives that may justify the Fregean claim9? My suggestion is to follow more strictly Frege's different worries in defining thoughts, on the one hand, as eternal objective realities in which truth is revealed; on the other hand as what is responsible for different cognitive contents. I will give some details on a possible alternative solution of the puzzle that runs against the identification of sense and linguistic meaning, especially when we are thinking of the sense of a sentence in context. 3. Frege Unwanted Ambiguity That the notion of sense in Frege is too rich and has been put to serve too many functions is a widespread idea. Interpretations of Frege however are often so much detailed, that it is difficult to exit from one set of exegesis and connect it to other ones. Burge's discussion on contrast [C] is actually not so distant from a 8 «Burge does not note the odd omission in Frege, if Sinn is not meaning, of any technical term for the ordinary notion of meaning" and "Frege, of course, has preempted 'Bedeutung' for denotation or reference, whatever the translators may decide to do, and therefore, on Burge's account, still owes us a technical term for meaning in the ordinary sense» (Kripke, 2008, p. 201). 9 A well known suggestion has been given by Evans (1985) with the dynamic notion of "keeping track of an object" in space and in time. As also Textor (2011, p. 146) remarks, this is a very fascinating possible development of Frege's ideas, but it seems really hard to make dynamic senses a proper interpretation of the eternal stuff in the realm of sense that Frege was trying to account. 4 more general discussion, starting from some remarks in Dummett (1981, ch. X), on a deep contrast in Frege's treatment of thought. Although there are strong disagreements on different points of Fregean exegesis, it seems to me that some convergence among interpreters is beginning to consolidate. Salmon (1982, p. 12) speaks of three different aspects of sense, of which one is psychological and of little interest for Frege, and the other two are a semantic notion – the mechanism by which the reference of the term is secured and semantically determined – and a cognitive notion – the informative value of the term, that is the contribution made to the information content of sentences containing the term. According to Currie (1982), Frege's notion of sense fulfils two different roles: the information conveyed by a sentence and the need to justify the introduction of a precise notion from an intuitive one. This last claim is rejected by Dummett (1989, p. 299), who wonders how an intuitive and a precise notion may have the same sense. Beaney (1997) answers Dummett on this point, claiming that the paradox of analysis shows that «in analysing something, the analysans and the analysandum must, at the very least, be logically equivalent» (p. 226). From this and other arguments Beaney (1997, ch. 8) claims that the notion of "Sinn" contains two different trends which derive from the splitting of what Frege called "conceptual content": on the one hand we have the logical content, corresponding to semantic sense, to be developed in the main tradition of philosophy of language from Wittgenstein's Tractatus onwards; on the other hand we have the cognitive sense, which is the conception laid down in the discussion of intuitive difference of thoughts in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung". This tension in the notion of Fregean Sinn has been often expressed in two contrasting Fregean tenets: 1) Structurally different sentences can express the same thought. 2) The structure of a sentence (uniquely) reflects the structure of the thought it expresses. Many authors agree in recognizing in Frege different motivations behind the two theses, motivations that might make Frege unaware of the contrast. The motivations derive from particular problems and concerns, on the one hand, ontological or logical worries linked to the problem of the objectivity of thought, and on the other hand epistemological worries linked to the interest in linguistic understanding and belief contexts (Dummett, 1981; Currie, 1985; Garavaso, 1991; Bell, 1996; Weiner, 1997; Penco, 2003a, 2003b; Künne, 2007; Kemmerling, 2008; Textor 2009)10. The kind of solution suggested by these different, but converging exegetical claims has already been hinted at: theses (1) and (2) reflect two different trends in Frege's conceptions of sense: the semantic and the cognitive one: the former expressing the idea of sense as truth conditions as it would have been developed in formal semantics, and the latter expressing the idea of sense as cognitive import and reason for disagreements in beliefs. How can we apply this solution to the question [Q]? When entangled with the cognitive conception is it difficult to accept the Fregean claim on sameness of thought in [T], and for this reason authors like Dummet, Perry and Kripke reacted saying that this passage is a mistake on Frege's side and does not represent the correct vision of sense. This rejection of Frege parallels the rejection of other passages (e. g. a letter to Husserl in 1906) considered "non-Fregean" by Dummett and Kripke: these passages however are compatible with a truth conditional conception of sense. On the other hand Burge himself has been too rapid in using [T] to substantiate his claim that sense is not linguistic meaning. He is insisting (like Dummett) that senses are self-subsistent entities; but the cognitive conception of sense clashes with the idea that the two sentences "today is F" and "Yesterday is F" may express the same thought. Probably Burge did not give enough attention to the warning given by Ruth Barcan (quoted in Burge, 1979, footnote 4) who worries about the reading according to which the sense of an expression may vary from occasion to occasion, and asks : «what would become of the Fregean slogan 'to give the meaning is to give the truth conditions'?». Burge comments that what Frege writes about indexicals, whose sense varies from occasion to occasion, is «the only correct reading of his view on these terms». Why not to show instead that, analysing indexicals, Frege is just trying to save the truth conditional vision of sense? And at the same time giving a role to linguistic meaning? Burge himself implicitly accepts the distinction between the two dimensions of sense, but he cannot put together the disjecta membra of Frege's worries. 10 I speak of convergence, but still there is a lot of space for disagreement: for example Joan Weiner (1997, p. 103) speaks of a «tension between the role sense seems to play in Frege's explanation of his logic and the role it seems to play in a theory of meaning», but does not take Frege's quotations to show that the sameness of sense is logical equivalence – although Frege expressly says that about thoughts in his 1906 letter to Husserl. The main difference among the authors is the grade of coherence, which they want Frege to fulfill. 5 Kripke and Burge were both assuming a unique conception of Sinn pushing it to its extreme consequences, while Frege really was driven by different worries and, especially in his last writings, attempting new ways. The solution of the conflict is not to postulate an ambiguity, but to recognize Frege's "oscillations" (see Penco, 2003b) in treating the cognitive and the semantic aspects of sense: "Today is F" and "Yesterday was F", said the subsequent day, have the same truth conditions: these utterances express the same "semantic" sense, the same eternal thought (and, from Kripke's point of view, they should have the same truth-values in all possible worlds in which that day exists). Therefore, if we regard the truthconditional notion (as Kripke, 2008, footnote 91 implicitly does), it seems awkward to reject Frege's claim of sameness of sense in [T]. Certainly, as Künne (2007) would say, the same thought – the same truth conditions – is articulated in two different ways, which account for the different cognitive access to the same objective thought. The problem is not only if there is a tension in Frege's notion of sense, but if this tension may find a solution. Given that the tension is more vivid in Frege's treatment of indexicals than elsewhere, I think that a solution of this problem in this context is fundamental for a better interpretation of Frege's view. Fromt this point of view I think that one of the best possible ways to find a solution of the tension beteen different trends in Frege's notion of sense is to develop the implicit suggestion given by Burge in hinting at a treatment of indexical as complex demonstratives. 4. Towards a Theory of Hidden Demontrations: The Case of "I" If we take into account the tension in Frege between a semantic and a cognitive treatment of thoughts or senses and their components, the conflict between Burge and Kripke tends to disappear. Certainly both should accept that, on the semantic-ontological reading, "today is F" and "yesterday is F" express the same "semantic sense", given that the two utterances have the same truth conditions and that, from the point of view of epistemological worries, the two sentences express two different "cognitive senses" towards which a speaker may have distinct epistemic attitudes, or, using Künne's terminology, they express two different ways to articulate the same truth conditional thought. The partial solution of the conflict between Burge and Kripke concerns the difference in defining sameness and difference of sense: this definition depends on choosing one aspect (semantic or cognitive) of the Fregean conception of sense. Therefore, it might seem that the different perspective on the identification or rejection of sense and linguistic meaning is linked to this point; however, even in case we reject the general identification of sense and linguistic meaning, there is a still a strict link between linguistic meaning and cognitive sense, although the cognitive aspect of sense seems to go beyond the mere linguistic meaning. This point therefore needs clarification. Kripke says that «If Burge were right, Frege's use of Sinn would be closely analogous to Kaplan's "content", and "meaning", in the ordinary sense, to Kaplan's "character"» (2008, p. 201). This analogy seems to me misleading: if "linguistic meaning" could11 be reduced to "character" or to linguistic rules conventionally attached to a linguistic expression, Frege's notion of sense as mode of presentation of the reference requires something more that Kaplan's "content" or generally "intention"; if we take, for instance, Frege's view of concepts as characteristic functions, we may easily take the sense of a concept not as a function (which is in Frege case the reference of a predicate) but as a procedure attached to function (see Penco, 2009). How to apply this idea to the case of indexicals? In the following I try to give an alternative view based on the difference between "cognitive" sense and linguistic meaning compatible with a "procedural" view of sense. In this setting two tokens of "I am tired" uttered by me and by you have the same linguistic meaning but different "cognitive" senses, that is, are different ways to present different referents, depending on who is speaking. We have the same linguistic meaning, or the same general rule that is applied to every occurrence of "I" and this linguistic meaning, together with contextual features, gives you the way in which a particular individual is presented. This sounds very similar to Kaplan's solution but with the terminological warning that a Fregean sense as a mode of presentation of the referent is to be identified by character plus what is required to "activate" character in context. Is there any advantage in that? Or is the only advantage just a more "Kaplanian" rendering of Frege's sense? Not really, because the contribution of the context in Kaplan is just – in the case of "I" – the speaker in the context: we have on the one hand the linguistic part ("I") and the contextual part (the speaker in the 11 If we take the recent discussion on meaning developed by Russell (2008), we should take character as just an aspect of what is normally called "meaning". 6 context). It is still unclear which feature of the context performs the function of Frege's cognitive sense: what corresponds in the context to the mode of presentation of the speaker when we use the indexical "I"? Kaplan does not have this problem because his semantic theory is not required to fill this cognitive gap12. With the idea of autonymous sense, and with the idea of non-conceptual component, Kripke's and Burge's interpretations are trying to give an answer to this problem. However, we need a further step in checking the way in which the character of an indexical is activated. The linguistic rule of "I" apparently is activated by the uttering itself of the expression in a context: having distinguished semantic and cognitive senses, we may take the cognitive sense of "I" – or the mode of presentation of the individual referred to by "I" – as given by this actual uttering the word "I". In this case the utterance itself may be considered a demonstration pointing to the speaker herself, as, with different strenghts, Künne (1992), Harcourt (1993) and Textor (2007) suggest13. If we take this step, we may give some substance to the suggestion given by Burge (1977) when he considers an indexical as a complex demonstrative. In fact a demonstrative is always intended to contain a demonstration coherent with the intention of the speaker (if not, the demonstration is just wrong). Under this view, the sense of all indexicals always contains a hidden demonstration, which in the case of "I" is the utterance itself, which points to the speaker herself in the act of expressing as demonstrating herself14. If we developed Burge's suggestion, many things should follow: there are no "pure indexicals" and every indexical requires a hidden demonstration, that contains an intention to refer and a conventional way to refer (demonstrations, like all non-linguistic signs, are linked to different conventions)15. The development of a theory of this kind is not the aim of the present paper, but some hints can be given applying the few notions we have discussed to the classical Fregean problem of different senses of "I". Frege claims that in the proposition "I am wounded" said by dr. Lauben, the word "I" has a sense uniquely given for the speaker and a sense which is used for communicating with the audience, like "he who is speaking to you at this moment"; therefore "I" would have two kinds of senses, one for the speaker and one for the hearer. Although the "special and primitive way" in which somebody is presented to himself has been denounced as an example of private language (and maybe Wittgenstein didn't like this paper of Frege's for this remark also), the remark seems to have a more simple reading, as Kripke (2008, p. 211-215) suggests: the utterance expresses a thought which can be thought or had only by the speaker himself but may be understood by a hearer who apparently «knows what type of thought is being expressed» (p. 215). In a more recent terminology we might say that the mental file attached to the expression "I" varies from the speaker and the hearer (Recanati, 2012, 2013). The same utterance ("I am wounded") on one hand has different senses (for the speaker and for the hearer) and on the other hand express the same truth conditions: it has different cognitive senses for the speaker and for the hearer, but the same semantic sense. But here we cannot say, as in normal cases treated by Künne's distinction, that the same thought is articulated in two different ways, because it seems that we have the same articulation. However, what happens if for "articulation" we think of the different procedures used to "express" or to "understand" the utterance? We have here two different precedures: the procedure used to express myself with "I" and the procedures used by a hearer to decode the utterance "I" in the context are different procedures; this should be enough to justify the difference stated by Frege between "I" from a first person perspective and from a third person perspective. It is however on the question of sameness of sense between sentences using the indexical "I" and other kinds of sentences that Frege's ambivalence on the conception of Sinn touches its limits. In a challenging passage, Frege (1897) says that the same thought expressed by Dr. Lauben with "I was wounded" is expressed in saying "Dr. Lauben has been wounded". In fact all these sentences are true if and only if Dr. Lauben is wounded. Therefore the sameness of thought cannot be other than identity of truth conditions, 12 Although Kaplan (2012) represents a new cognitive "turn" in semantics starting from an original treatment of this problem, not so distant from Evans (1981). 13 Actually Harcourt (1993) criticizes Künne's interpretation, but in doing so he seems to accept his more original idea: the role of demonstrations in the use of demonstratives and in particular on the indexical "I". I have begun to get the idea of indexicals as complex demonstratives in discussing Künne's criticism of Kripke (Penco, forthcoming). 14 Given that the case of "I" – normally considered a "pure indexical" – is the most difficult case, it might not be so difficult to imagine a generalization of the case to other indexicals, also if this would certainly require a different set of arguments. 15 This step gives some substance to an application of Frege's theory of demonstration that is what Kaplan himself saves in Frege's overall view. In terms of Kaplan's theory, Frege's sense would therefore be equated to the procedure that – from context and linguistic meaning – gives the content and therefore the reference, procedure that is not treated inside a semantic theory, but would be needed if we wanted to apply that theory to some actual situation. The expression of this need in a different form is now emerging in Recanati (2012) and Kaplan (2012). 7 expressing the eternal objective thought. Yet Frege, after having recognized the samemess of thought, insists that «a difference must be recognized». Certainly the difference does not concern linguistic meanings – assuming that "Dr Lauben" has no linguistic meaning (no connotation). This difference is between what Frege used to call "sense" while making the case of different belief contexts about the Morning and the Evening Star, and strikes back when he seems to consider sameness of thought as samenes of truth conditions. Let me conclude with a reference to a Wittgensteinian theme that takes us a little off topic: assuming for the sake of the argument that the way of fixing the referent is explained with an hidden demonstrative, we may rephrase the difference between the two uses of "I" in a Wittgensteinian way: there is a fundamental difference in a demonstration when the demonstration is used by the speaker for self ascription and when it is used by the hearers to understand who is the speaker of the utterance. 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