Extensionality, Indirect Contexts and Frege's Hierarchy

Dialectica 70 (3):431-462 (2016)
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Abstract

It is well known that Frege was an extensionalist, in the following sense: he held that the truth-value of a sentence is always a function only of the references of its parts. One consequence of this view is that expressions occurring in certain linguistic contexts – for example, the that-clauses of propositional attitude ascriptions – do not have their usual references, but refer instead to what are usually their senses. But although a number of philosophers have objected to this result, no one has yet attempted to see what happens to Frege's views – and, in particular, to his theory of sense and reference – if his extensionalism is abandoned while his other views are maintained. This paper thus does two things. First, it clears the way for such an attempt, by arguing that recent defences of Frege's extensionalism – by Tyler Burge, Saul Kripke, Terence Parsons and Christopher Peacocke – fall short. Second, it sketches a positive proposal for a non-extensionalist application of Frege's theory of sense and reference to sentences of indirect discourse and ascriptions of propositional attitude.

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Nicholas Koziolek
Washington University in St. Louis

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References found in this work

The Varieties of Reference.Louise M. Antony - 1987 - Philosophical Review 96 (2):275.
Quantifying in.David Kaplan - 1968 - Synthese 19 (1-2):178-214.
Our Entitlement to Self-Knowledge.Tyler Burge & Christopher Peacocke - 1996 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 96 (1):91-116.
On Sinn and Bedeutung.Gottlob Frege - 1997 - In Michael Beaney (ed.), Frege Reader. Cambridge: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 151-172.

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