Conclusion

I recap the major points for which I have argued, and end by discussing Frege’s Three Realms and how we might amend his vision to take circumstances and roles into account.

Solving the Identity Problems

I return to the problems concerning identity that plagued Frege’s Begriffsschrift and eventually led to the theory of sense and reference. I claim that within a flexible theory of the truth conditions, what I call the “reflexive-referential” theory, there is a common sense solution.

Sense and Denotation: The Theory

I describe Frege’s theory of sense and denotation. (I use ‘denotation’ as a translation for ‘Bedeutung’ in discussing this theory.) I consider motivations and problems, especially for his treatment of the sense and reference of concept expressions, and whether a regress is involved in senses for names. I consider the relation of the new scheme to the scheme of the Begriiffsschrift.

Frege’s Begriffsschrift: Problems

On Frege’s theory of conceptual content in his Begriffsschrift, the sentences “A = B” and “A = A” refer to the same circumstance, and so have the same conceptual content. But sentences with the same conceptual content should license the same inferences, which is not the case with these sentences. Frege’s solution is to jettison ‘=’ and introduce ‘≡’. A sentence “X ≡ Y” is true if ‘X’ and ‘Y’ co-refer; the sentence is about names, not the things named. “A ≡ A” and “A ≡ B” do not refer to the same circumstance, and the problem is avoided, or so it seems. I discuss strengths and shortcoming of this strategy

Frege’s Begriffsschrift: Accomplishments

In his Begriffsschrift Frege gave us the basis of our modern understanding of quantification and made many other contributions to logic. The underlying semantics is his theory of conceptual contents, in which sentences stand for circumstances, involving objects falling under concepts (properties), and properties falling under higher-level properties.

Episodes and Attitudes

I argue that the flexible theory does not give completely adequate account. We need to bring in utterances and cognitive episodes to handle some of the challenges to innocent theories. And we need to add what I call roles to the level of sense, to handle indexicality in language and self-knowledge in cognition. I discuss Frege and Kaplan’s account of ‘today’ and ‘yesterday’.

Integrating Frege’s Theories

I argue that Frege could have and should have added the level of sense to his Begriffsschrift scheme, retained circumstances as the references of sentences, and added the level of denotation, relabelled, ‘extension’ for the purposes of logic. I claim the resulting theory would retain the insights of the theory of sense and reference, but be far more flexible, and would allow for an innocent account of the attitudes.

Introduction

I explain my basic claim: Frege’s doctrine that sentences embedded in indirect discourse and propositional attitude reports refer to Thoughts, their customary senses, put the philosophies of mind and language on a detour. The doctrine reflected and reinforced a picture of the attitudes as consisting in relations to propositions. The alternative picture for which I argue is that the attitudes are rather episodes that have truth-conditions that can be classified in a variety of ways. The propositions we take to be “what is said” or “what is believed” give only a partial description of these truth-conditions. I then lay out the plan for the book, and discuss issues of terminology.

Disarming the Slingshot

The slingshot is an argument, due to Alonzo Church, in favor of Frege’s decision to take truth values to be the denotations of sentences, ruling out circumstances for this honor. I argue that a reflexive-referential analysis show the slingshot to be unconvincing. I discuss different conception of circumstances and the use that Quine made of the slingshot.

“On Sense and Denotation”

This chapter is an exposition of Frege’s most influential essay, “On Sense and Reference.” It first discusses names and descriptions, modes of presentation, imperfect and perfect languages. Then I turn to his arguments in favor of truth values being the denotations of—the doctrine that on my view puts us on Frege’s Detour.