Comments on Gary Ostertag’s “Fine on Frege’s Puzzle”

Gary Ostertag’s chapter is an intriguing and probing investigation into the concept of coordination, or de jure co-reference, in which he is concerned not only to criticize the views on coordination which I presented in “Semantic Relationism” (SR) but also to develop a view of his own, one in which coordination is not a feature of what we say, but of how we say it....

Comments on Paolo Bonardi’s “Coordination, Understanding, and Semantic Requirements”

Paolo Bonardi has written extensively and illuminatingly on direct reference theory, and I am grateful for his present comments on the conceptual foundations of semantic relationism. Central to the doctrine of semantic relationism is the relation of coordination. This is the relation that normally holds between two tokens of the name “Cicero” though not between a token of “Cicero” and a token of “Tully,” even though there is co-reference in both cases. Although the concept of coordination is central to semantic relationism I do not think of the doctrine as having exclusive claim on the concept. As I mention in ...

Coordination, Understanding, and Semantic Requirements

In his monograph Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine proposes two characterizations of coordination between proper names: an intuitive test and a technical definition. The intuitive characterization is grounded in a notion of understanding distinct from the familiar notion of linguistic competence. Three prima facie appealing proposals to characterize this notion of understanding are examined in the present chapter and then dismissed as intrinsically implausible or as incompatible with Fine’s semantics. Not even his technical characterization of coordination, involving the notion of semantic requirement, enable us to escape the impasse. Ultimately, the question of what exactly coordination between names is will remain open.

De Jure Anti-Coreference and Mental Files

The chapter introduces the phenomenon of de jure anti-coreference. Roughly, two representation occurrences are de jure anti-coreferential when they must refer to distinct objects in virtue of meaning. It argues that in contrast to its opposing notion, de jure coreference, it is rarely found in human representational systems. It explains how the Fregean can hope to explain this asymmetry by appealing to senses or mental files. It argues, however, that such approaches, in order to account for dynamic coordination, must ultimately appeal to semantic relationism. This is surprising since semantic relationism is often thought of as an alternative to Fregean semantics.

Cognition and recognition

Expressions are synonymous if they have the same semantic content. Complex expressions are synonymously isomorphic in Alonzo Church’s sense if one is obtainable from the other by a sequence of alphabetic changes of bound variables or replacements of component expressions by syntactically simple synonyms. Synonymous isomorphism provides a very strict criterion for synonymy of sentences. Several eminent philosophers of language hold that synonymous isomorphism is not strict enough. These philosophers hold that ‘Greeks prefer Greeks’ and ‘Greeks prefer Hellenes’ express different propositions even if they are synonymously isomorphic. They hold that the very recurrence (multiple occurrence) of ‘Greeks’ contributes to the proposition expressed something that indicates the very recurrence in question. Kit Fine argues that this thesis, which he labels semantic relationism calls for a radically new conception of semantics. I have argued that the relevant phenomenon is wholly pragmatic, entirely non-semantic. Here I supplement the case with a new argument. No cognition without recognition—or almost none. With this observation, standard Millianism has sufficient resources to confront Frege’s puzzle and related problems without injecting pragmatic phenomena where they do not belong.

Two Versions of Millianism

This chapter offers a systematic assessment of Kit Fine’s Semantic Relationism (2007), in which he presents a “relational” version of Millianism (about names and related expressions). It compares this version of Millianism with the standard nonrelational version. It focuses on their different responses to two aspects of Frege’s puzzle—one involving the cognitive, assertive, and conversational contents of uses of nonhyperintensional sentences; the other involving the propositions expressed by attitude ascriptions. Regarding the first aspect of the puzzle, the chapter argues that the two versions of Millianism give comparable and largely correct results. Regarding the second, it shows that relational Millianism faces counterexamples that are easily handled by nonrelational Millianism, when both are combined with a reasonable semantics for attitude verbs.