Fregean Sense Research Articles

The Evaluative Content of Emotion

AbstractThe content of emotion sometimes seems to be conflated with its object, but we can distinguish between content and object on the model of Fregean sense versus reference. Fear, for instance, refers to something the subject of fear is afraid of and represents that object of fear as dangerous, so that the emotion can be said to have evaluative content. Here I attempt to clarify and defend my view of emotional discomfort or other affect as what does the evaluating. Some current accounts of the unpleasantness of physical pain take a similar view, but in application to emotion they call for an explanation of how emotional affect can simultaneously evaluate both the affective symptoms of emotion and the emotion's object. I suggest an explanation and indicate how it supports the link between emotional valence and motivational force.

What Motivates Fregean Anti-Individualism?

In Anti-Individualism and Knowledge Jessica Brown criticises views of content that combine Fregean Sense and anti-individualism. Brown assumes that all Fregean theories are motivated by a picture of the rational thinker as someone who will always have transparent access to the simple inferential consequences of his thoughts. This picture, Brown argues, is incompatible with anti-individualism about content. While traditional Fregean theories have indeed had such motivation, Brown’s mistake is in attributing this motivation to the modern Fregean anti-individualist. My goal in this paper is to bring to light a different, and seldom discussed, motivation for Fregean views of content which is immune to Browns objections.

About a mature theory of Fregean sense

Marie Duži, Bjorn Jespersen, and Pavel Materna: Procedural Semantics for Hyperintensional Logic. Foundations and Applications of Transparent Intentional Logic , vol. 17 of series “Logic, Epistemology, and the Unity of Science”, Springer, Dordrecht, Heidelberg, London, New York, 2010; xiii+552 pages, ISBN 978-90-481-8811-6, e-ISBN 978-90-481-8812-3. DOI: 10.1007/978-90-481-8812-3

A FILOSOFIA SEMÂNTICA TRADICIONAL: Uma abordagem entre Frege e Russell

RESUMO: O objetivo deste artigo é apresentar o que Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) entende sobre sentido (Sinn) e referência (Bedeutung) dos nomes próprios e das sentenças assertivas completas e a crítica que Bertrand Russell (1872 – 1970) faz ao sentido fregeano, ou seja, uma sentença não tem sentido como Frege propõe, ela simplesmente denota. A investigação far-se-á através da obra Sobre o Sentido e a Referência – Über Sinn und Bedeutung – [2009 (1892)], na qual Frege propõe uma distinção entre os termos e da obra Da Denotação – On Denoting – [1978 (1905)], na qual Russell sustenta que uma expressão só denota. Não é a minha intenção fazer uma abordagem minuciosa, e sim apresentar a distinção entre sentido e referência para Frege, e analisar como Russell tenta resolver o paradoxo semântico fregeano. É neste sentido que este artigo se norteará.

Cognitive Phenomenology and Indirect Sense

Abstract Acquaintance with the non-sensory cognitive phenomenology of a given intentional content can act as a Fregean sense presenting that content. This provides (i) a mechanism for acquaintance with (a kind of) sense, (ii) a sense that is subject and context invariant, and (iii) a mechanism for the immediate presentation of a referent. This kind of sense can be used to defend Kripke’s acquaintance-based development of Frege’s claim that when a sentence S is embedded in an attitude ascription it refers to the thought that S expresses in that context (and not its unembedded referent, the true).

Frontloading and Fregean sense: Reply to Neta, Schroeter and Stanley

I would like to thank Ram Neta, Laura Schroeter, and Jason Stanley for their generous and probing comments on Constructing the World. 1 All three of them home in on key issues in the argumentation of the book. Neta and Schroeter focus on the argument for A Priori Scrutability, and especially the key frontloading argument for that thesis. Stanley focuses on whether the semantic values that are defined in terms of scrutability can truly serve as Fregean senses. All of them raise serious challenges that need to be addressed.

On the Sense and Reference of the Concept of Truth

AbstractThis paper analyzes the concept of truth in terms of an account of Fregean sense as cognitive value. The account highlights the importance of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference for the individuation of senses. Explicit truth attributions, like ‘that I smell the scent of violets is true’ involve an inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in the that-clause concepts of thoughts that they employ: one cannot understand the that-clause concept of the thought in the truth attribution without understanding the thought the that-clause concept is a concept of. This is not a redundancy that eliminates or deflates cognitive value, but an exploitation, by the concept of truth, of the inter-level version of understanding-based knowledge of co-reference in critical reflective thinking. The cognitive value of the concept of truth is to combine semantically with explicit ways of thinking of thoughts to make critical reflective thinking possible. This account of the cognitive value of the concept of truth assigns cognitive value not by construing the concept of truth as a way of thinking about some thing, but by articulating its broader cognitive role.

Citation and Citationality

AbstractThis essay explores the semiotics of citation. The citation is an act that re-presents some other event of discourse and marks that re-presentation as not(-quite) what it presences. The citation is a play of sameness and difference, identity and alterity, an interdiscursive calibration of an event of citing and a cited event, and is reflexive about that very fact. As such, citational acts can open up new social horizons of possibility, signification, and performative power. This essay investigates the citational underpinnings of the Fregean sense, Austinian performativity, and Derridean deconstruction. I give particular attention to Derrida's reading of Austin, and his development of the concept of citationality. As I argue, Derrida's insistence on the necessary possibility of citationality elides the fact that citations are always already achievements in context, and thus empirical facts about particular (types of) acts in the world. Not all acts are reflexive about their citationality, and this ...

A new account of rationality and semantics

The aim of this paper is to show how a new outlook on human cognitive abilities, and in accordance with this a different view of rationality, can influence semantics and one of the most prominent debates in this field, namely, conflict between Fregeans and non Fregean anti-indiviidualists. This new account of rationality will help us difuse some of the main motivators for Fregean view of semantics and it will help us in justifying non-Fregean anti-individualism but also in eliminating some of the apparent contradictions in Fregean anti-individualism of, e.g. Campbell and Evans. In this attempt of bringing together some of the latest insights into human cognition and semantics I will be dealing mainly with Jessica Brown's outlook on motivation for Fregean sense and Ruth Millikan's embedded view on rationality.

Sense, Reference and Hybridity

In his paper on ‘Frege's Theory of Sense and Reference’ Saul Kripke remarks: “Like the present account, Kunne stresses that for Frege times, persons, etc. can be part of the expression of the thought. However, his reading is certainly not mine in significant respects . . .”. On both counts, he is right. As regards the differences between our readings, in some respects I shall confess to having made a mistake, in several others I shall remain stubbornly unmoved. Thus I shall insist on the need for distinguishing Fregean sense from linguistic (lexico-grammatical) meaning, I shall resist Kripke's function-theoretic account of ‘hybrid’ thought-expressions, and I shall deplore his transformation of Gottlob Frege into Gottrand Fressell. As regards this transformation, I shall argue that some of the main points Kripke wants to drive home do not depend on it.

O Triplo Sentido de Conteúdo Intencional

Abstract The content of a mental act- a pivotal element of a theory of intentionality- has a threefold meaning: as a logical concept, is the ideal signification, as a psychological concept, is the core of a noema (i.e., the instantiation of an ideal and as an ontological concept, is the object (real or unreal) intented by the nucleus. We can make a parallel between this Husserlian threefold distinction and the Fregean sense/”reference” distinction, reducing it to the sense/object distinction. This paralleism is not to force the Husserl’s thought to Frege’s, but, on the contrary, to show the structure of the triple meaning of content: Husserl mtroduces the difference between ideal signification and instantiated signification, so the pure and Simple signification and the noematic sense are species of the genus sense. Husserl’s theory of intentionality and his philosophy of language does not go Frege, but beyond. The recognition of that allows us to see the error of Føesdal’s mterpretation, as while as those of Sartre and Gurwitsch. The Fregean sense/”reference” distinction is subsumed by the Husserlian conceptual trio ideal signification/noematic sense/object. This triad of concepts houses not only a semantic theory (as Frege’s pair), but also a theory of a theory of perception. Husserl integrates its semantics in a theory of of consciousness that overcomes the intentio doctrines ofBrentano, Twardowsk1 and the medievals.

Anti‐Individualism and Knowledge.

Contemporary philosophy of mind is dominated by anti- individualism, which holds that a subject's thoughts are determined not only by what is inside her head but also by aspects of her environment. Despite its dominance, anti-individualism is subject to a daunting array of epistemological objections: that it is incompatible with the privileged access each subject has to her thoughts, that it undermines rationality, and, absurdly, that it provides a new route to a priori knowledge of the world. In this rigorous and persuasive study, Jessica Brown defends anti- individualism from these epistemological objections. The discussion has important consequences for key epistemological issues such as skepticism, closure, transmission, and the nature of knowledge and warrant.According to Brown's analysis, one main reason for thinking that anti-individualism is incompatible with privileged access is that it undermines a subject's introspective ability to distinguish types of thoughts. So diagnosed, the standard focus on a subject's reliability about her thoughts provides no adequate reply. Brown defuses the objection by appeal to the epistemological notion of a relevant alternative. Further, she argues that, given a proper understanding of rationality, anti- individualism is compatible with the notion that we are rational subjects. However, the discussion of rationality provides a new argument that anti-individualism is in tension with Fregean sense. Finally, Brown shows that anti-individualism does not create a new route to a priori knowledge of the world. While rejecting solutions that restrict the transmission of warrant, she argues that anti-individualists should deny that we have the type of knowledge that would be required to use a priori knowledge of thought content to gain a priori knowledge of the world.

Departing from Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language (review)

Reviewed by: Departing from Frege: Essays in the philosophy of language by R. M. Sainsbury Xuelin He Departing from Frege: Essays in the philosophy of language. By R. M. Sainsbury. London: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 256. ISBN 0415272556. $105 (Hb). Perhaps most philosophers of language tracing the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition would begin with Gottlob Frege’s views about identity statements and empty names. Mark Sainsbury in this book is no exception, as the title indicates. However, he goes so far from the assumed origin that the twelve selected essays, previously published over a twenty-year span, put together contribute to the ontogeny of a new semantic theory of singular terms. Besides the reprinted essays, S adds an introduction that presents the central theme of paring down Fregeanism and comments on each essay. [End Page 229] In the introduction, S claims that two crucial elements in Frege’s writing should be retained: the distinction between sense and reference, and Frege’s allowance for sense without a referent. He takes both as a starting point in the following essays to develop his argument for the rejection of descriptivist accounts of singular terms. The first essay, ‘Understanding and theories of meaning’, is an argument in response to Donald Davidson’s truth interpretation theory. It is argued that a ‘means-that’ theory is as good as a truth theory in constructing a philosophy of meaning. The second essay is intended to serve as an introduction to Gareth Evans’s The varieties of reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). The third essay, ‘Concepts without boundaries’, provides a fuzzy-logic-based alternative to Frege’s claim that concepts draw sharp boundaries. Essay 4, ‘Russell on names and communication’, is addressed to Saul Kripke’s attribution of the description theory of names to Bertrand Russell. The fifth essay, ‘How can something say something’, continues the author’s rereading of Russell with the focus on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment. Essay 6 explores whether the reliability conditional is consistent with the knowledge claim in Timothy Williamson’s epistemic theory of vagueness. Essay 7 argues that the Fregean conception of sense should be treated as sameness of sense. This notion secures the convergence of meanings that relates to the same proper name. The author argues that notions such as logical truth, logical form, and logical validity cannot make sense without presupposing Fregean sense. In Essay 8, the author’s treatment of the systematic transformation of indexicals in reported speech raises many interesting issues relative to formal semantic theories. In cases of nondetachability, no exchange of coreferring expressions can occur without affecting the truth value of what was said. This suggests a criterion to distinguish anaphoric terms from indexicals. It is argued that all indexicals can be properly reported by nonindexicals in the sense of splitting the reported speech into the scene-setting part and content-ascribing part. Essay 9, ‘Names, fictional names and “really” ’, poses the puzzle that the apparent lack of bearers for false names makes these names no less unintelligible in communication. By challenging the solutions from Evans and David Wiggins, S convincingly argues that there can be a sense without a referent. Essay 10 favors the abandonment of senses as entities. Essay 11, ‘Two ways to smoke a cigarette’, deals with the inconsistency between the Fregean principle of compositionality, which assumes that the meaning of a complex expression should be a function of the meaning of its parts, and his claim that the understanding of a word is possible only in the context of a proposition. The last essay seeks to justify a semantics of natural language based on the view that expressions could have sense yet lack reference. Reading these essays, one is ever mindful of the consistency of the author’s arguments spanning a time period of more than twenty years. Most of the analyses are still relevant and are likely to stimulate further research on singular terms and reference in the future. Xuelin He Guangdong Foreign Studies University Copyright © 2007 Linguistic Society of America

The first person: problems of sense and reference

0 Consider ‘I’ as used by a given speaker and some ordinary proper name of that speaker: are these two coreferential singular terms which differ in Fregean sense? If they could be shown to be so, we might be able to explain the logical and epistemological peculiarities of ‘I’ by appeal to its special sense and yet feel no temptation to think of its reference as anything more exotic than a human being.

On the Link Between Frege's Platonic-Realist Semantics and His Doctrine of Private Senses

Frege's doctrine that the demonstrative ‘I’ has a private, incommunicable sense creates tension within his theory of meaning. Fregean sense is supposed to be something objective, which exists independently of its being cognized by anyone. And the notion of a private sense corresponding to primitive aspects of an individual of which only he can be awaredoes violence both to Frege's theory of sense as well as to our notionof language as something essentially intersubjective. John Perry has arguedthat Frege was led to the doctrine of private senses in spite of his beliefin the objectivity of sense through his attempt to solve a problem which indexicals posed for his theory. And while philosophers have argued about whether the notion of a private sense is in fact problematic for Frege, they have tended to share Perry's assumption about its origin.

Taking Frege's name in vain

A widely held view about Fregean Sense has it that the determination of a sign's referent by the sign's sense is achieved viasatisfaction: the sense specifies a condition (or set of conditions) and the referent is that entity, if any, which uniquely satisfies that (set of) condition(s). This is usually held in conjunction with the claim that the sense is existentially and qualitatively independent of the referent: if the referent did not exist, or did not uniquely satisfy the sense, the sense would still exist and would still specify the same condition(s) that it actually does (and might determine a different referent than its actual one). Proponents of this view give several reasons for holding it. I describe these reasons and argue that they are not convincing. More generally, I try to show that the notion of satisfaction has no useful application within Frege's system. I then suggest an alternative account of the determination of a referent by a sense that I think is truer to Frege and more illuminating. Compared to the satisfaction view, my account construes determination as a more naturalistic and epistemically real relation between speakers and things in the world.

Burge on Content

Externalist accounts of the mind deny that the contents of our thoughts are type-individuated by our bodily properties. Intentional contents are said to be fixed instead by certain environmental aspects to which we are appropriately related.' In contrast, Individualistic accounts of the mind assert that content is type-individuated by features exclusive to the person's brain, body, or in the case of classical Dualism, by the immaterial mind. According to Individualists, our thought-contents are counterfactually independent of our external environment for their type-identity.2 In this paper, I shall discuss Tyler Burge's version of Externalism as applied to mental attitudes about empirical kinds.3 His version presents an interesting picture of cognitive attitudes because it blends together certain Fregean and Wittgensteinian themes. On the one hand, mental content has all the trademarks of a Fregean sense.4 On the other hand, a person's having a

Fregean Sense Overlap

Fregean Sense Overlap

Indexicals and Intensionality: A Fregean Perspective

* This paper began in an attempt to meet Christopher Peacocke's objections to an ancestor of its third section. I have been helped by comments on the first draft by Michael Gehman and Timothy Williamson. Improvements in subsequent drafts were prompted by discussion with David Kaplan, Terence Parsons, Mark Richard and Nathan Salmon and by comments from a referee for The Philosophical Review. The manuscript was prepared using the OPHIR font for the Macintosh computer, written by B. L. Tapscott of the University of Utah. My research was supported by a grant from the Committee on Research of Tulane University, for which I record my sincere appreciation. 'David Kaplan, Quantifying in, Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, D. Davidson and J. Hintikka, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), pp. 206-242, at p. 213. 2Though the headquote from Kaplan is apposite, I do not mean to second his idea that senses 'mediate between' thinkers and objects of thought, as some have supposed sense-data do between perceivers and objects of perception. Examples of recent Fregean work free of such an implication are Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), and Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Both authors subscribe to what might roughly be labelled an evidential conception of Fregean sense: whether or not a subject is employing a demonstrative or indexical mode of presentation of a particular type in a thought

Intentional content and demonstrative thought

Recently J. R. Searle1 has attempted to defend the view that the full content of all Intentional mental states is entirely determined by intrinsic features of internal representations; entirely, that is, by what is 'going on' inside an agent's head. One notorious problem that any such form of internalism will face is that of explaining how the full content of demonstrative thoughts may be so determined. For it has seemed to many theorists that demonstrative thought content depends on representation in a context not on full representation of that context. In order to substantiate his claims Searle has argued that indexical utterances/expressions and demonstrative thoughts have a completing Fregean sense enabling them to determine or pick out a unique object of reference. My aim here is to argue that the analysis of indexical sense presented is unable to account for object determination and, therefore, ought to be abandoned. The argument which I offer can be directed against any token-reflexive analysis of indexical expressions and is additionally interesting for this reason. The strategy Searle adopts2 is one of spelling out the so-called 'sense' of indexical expressions (and, eo ipso, the 'content' of demonstrative thoughts) by means of indicating the relations in which the object(s) of reference allegedly stand to utterances of token occurrences of in dexical expressions, that is,