The Sense of Communication

Abstract

In recent years, something of a consensus has emerged concerning Frege's distinction between sense and reference.' According to the Hybrid View, the contents of beliefs and other propositional attitudes are characteristically intensional: the content of a speaker's belief that a is F may differ from the content of her belief that b is F, even if a is b. But, the story goes, the meanings of sentences are another matter: if the terms t and u are co-referential (and the predicate Fu is extensional), then the meanings of the sentences rt is F' and ru is F' cannot differ So, for example, one' s belief that is may well have a different content from one's belief that is Hesperus, though is indeed Phosphorus. (Following Frege, I shall call the content of a belief, so understood, a thought.) On the other hand, the sentences is Phosphorus and is Hesperus have the same meaning, precisely because is Phosphorus. Thus, Frege was right about belief, but wrong about the meanings of proper names. Something like Frege's notion of sense is needed in a proper account of belief (and other propositional attitudes), but no such notion is needed in an account of the meanings of sentences (except, perhaps, in an account of the meanings of intensional operators). The wide acceptance of the Hybrid View2 derives in part from the agreed force of arguments for the claim that belief is intensional (in the