Sinning Against Frege

Abstract

F regean Sinn has been provocative, seminal, and prolific. But ever since it was propagated in English speaking philosophy, it has been widely misunderstood. Recent condemnations of Sinn-from Searle and Wittgenstein to Kripke and Donnellan-have to a significant degree rested on misunderstanding. My mission here is primarily historical. It is to trace the misunderstanding, and right some of the historical wrongs. I will not try to redeem Frege from all transgression, nor will I count Sinn a virtue. But I believe that better acquaintance with Sinn is a precondition for successfully eschewing it. The basic misunderstanding is the identification of Frege's notion of Sinn (sense) with the notion of linguistic meaning. The misunderstanding is an easy one to fall into for two reasons. For one, the term has always been vague, multi-purposed, and to some extent adaptive to the viewpoint of different theories. Pressing the term into service to characterize Frege's notion has seemed harmless enough, as long as it is made clear that the notion is restricted to an aspect of meaning relevant to fixing the truth value of sentences. A second reason for the misunderstanding has been that Frege did not lavish any considerable attention on the area in which the differences between sense and the ordinary notion of meaning are clearest-contextdependent reference. Although the differences between meaning and sense are easiest to notice with indexicals (including proper names), the distinction issues from the fundamental cast of Frege's work, a cast discernible throughout his career independently of issues about indexicals. Baldly put, Frege was primarily interested in the eternal structure of thought, of cognitive contents, not in conventional linguistic meaning. He pursued this interest by investigating the structure of language, and much of his work may be seen as directly relevant to theories of linguistic meaning.