Frege's Detour

Abstract

I argue that Frege’s treatment of propositional attitudes in “On Sense and Reference” put the philosophy of language on a detour. His doctrine of “indirect reference” reflected and reinforced the view that beliefs, desires, etc. consist in having relations to propositions. According to this doctrine expressions in embedded sentences in indirect discourse and propositional attitude reports do refer as they do when unembedded, but instead refer to their ordinary senses, so sentences refer to Thoughts, Frege’s version of what are now callled general or qualitative propositions. Davidson call this move abandoning “semantic innocence” which is the view that such embedded sentences work as they usually do. I agree with Davidson, that semantic innocence should not be abandonned. I argue that such cognitive states have truth-conditions in virtue of their causal and informational roles, which can be encoded in a variety of ways for different purposes, and provide a better explanation of the considerations that drove Frege to abandon innocence. I trace the problems I see to Frege’s abandonment of the framework of his early work, the Begriffsschrift. I argue that by adding the levels of senses and Thoughts to his Begriffsschriftframework, and retaining “circumstances” as the referents of sentences containing singular terms, Frege could have avoided the doctrine of indirect reference, and philosophy could have taken a different path.