Has semantics rested on a mistake?: and other essays

Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press (1991)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way.

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 90,221

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Frege‐Russell Semantics?Howard Wettstein - 1990 - Dialectica 44 (1‐2):113-135.
Direct reference in thought and speech.Kirk A. Ludwig - 1993 - Communication and Cognition: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly Journal 26 (1):49-76.
Brandom’s Incompatibility Semantics.Jaroslav Peregrin - 2008 - Philosophical Topics 36 (2):99-121.
Sense, reference, and philosophy.Jerrold J. Katz - 2004 - New York: Oxford University Press.
Fregean propositions, belief preservation and cognitive value.Marco Ruffino - 2007 - Grazer Philosophische Studien 75 (1):217-236.
The Paradox of Identity.William J. Greenberg - 1996 - Epistemologia 2 (2):207-226.
Knowledge, Content and the Wellsprings of Objectivity.Ron Wilburn - 2003 - In Preyer Gerhard, Peter Georg & Ulkan Maria (eds.), Protosociology. Klewer Academic Publishers.

Analytics

Added to PP
2009-01-28

Downloads
62 (#233,521)

6 months
2 (#658,980)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Author's Profile

Howard Wettstein
University of California, Riverside

Citations of this work

Was Heidegger an externalist?Cristina Lafont - 2005 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 48 (6):507 – 532.
Millian descriptivism.Frederick Kroon - 2004 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 82 (4):553 – 576.
Indexical Sinn: Fregeanism versus Millianism.João Branquinho - 2014 - Revista de Filosofia Aurora 26 (39):465-486.

View all 6 citations / Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references