Frege's Puzzle Research Articles

Confusion and explanation

In Talking about, Unnsteinsson defends an intentionalist theory of reference by arguing that confused referential intentions degrade reference. Central to this project is a “belief model” of both identity confusion and unconfused thought. By appealing to a well‐known argument from Campbell, I argue that this belief model falls short, because it fails to explain the inferential behavior it promises to explain. Campbell's argument has been central in the contemporary literature on Frege's puzzle, but Unnsteinsson's account of confusion provides an opportunity for more clarity about how the argument is best interpreted, and what it shows.

Reference and confusion

ABSTRACT Being in a state of confusion is, unfortunately, an ordinary part of human experience. What is going on in our heads exactly, when we are confused about something? Surely, there are many different ways of being confused, but in his engaging new book Talking About, Elmar Unnsteinsson takes on the special case of what he calls identity confusion. He suggests that understanding what happens when we are in a state of identity confusion – and what kinds of things this confusion allows us to, or inhibits us from doing – will dissolve Frege's puzzle. And more importantly, it will pave the road to a new theory of reference which relies on what he calls the Edenic Constraint – a constraint that makes acts of reference unavailable to victims of identity confusion. I argue that this account is convincing if the Edenic Constraint is restricted to certain cases of combinatory confusion – namely those that involve conflicting intentions – but that it is less plausible that the reference mechanism fails in cases of combinatory confusion that don't involve conflicting intentions, or in any cases of separatory confusion.

Is Frege's puzzle based on Psychological Data?

Is Frege's puzzle based on Psychological Data?

Names Are Variables

MILLIANISM and DESCRIPTIVISM are without question the two most prominent views with respect to the semantics of proper names. However, debates between MILLIANS and DESCRIPTIVISTS have tended to focus on a fairly narrow set of linguistic data and an equally narrow set of problems, mainly how to solve with Frege's puzzle and how to guarantee rigidity. In this article, the author focuses on a set of data that has been given less attention in these debates—namely, so-called predicative uses, bound uses, and shifted uses of names. The author first shows that these data points seem to favor a DESCRIPTIVIST view over a MILLIAN view, but the author then introduces an alternative view of names that not only provides a simple and elegant way of dealing with the data, but also retains rigidity without becoming subject to the problems raised by Frege's puzzle. This is the view that names are variables, also called VARIABILISM.

De se puzzles and Frege puzzles

ABSTRACT What is the relationship between Frege's puzzle and the puzzle of the de se? An increasingly influential view claims that the de se puzzle is merely an instance of Frege's puzzle and that the idea that de se attitudes pose a distinctive theoretical challenge rests on a myth. Here we argue that this view is misguided. There are important differences between the two puzzles. First, unlike Frege puzzle cases, de se puzzle cases involve unshareable Fregean senses. Second, unlike Frege puzzle cases, de se puzzle cases cannot be resolved by objective information alone. Further, there seem to be pure cases of each puzzle: instances of the de se puzzle which do not have a Fregean structure, and instances of Frege's puzzle, which do not involve de se attitudes. We conclude that the two puzzles are fundamentally different and that the traditional theory of attitudes needs to be amended.

Does Frege's Puzzle Beg the Question?

Frege's Puzzle is ordinarily introduced by way of example. We are presented with Frege-style cases in which co-referential names are not intersubstitutable salva veritate. I argue that this way of introducing the puzzle not only begs the question against Millianism but fails to account for our puzzlement. I propose a way of formulating the puzzle that captures the import of Frege's observations while avoiding presuppositions that bias the discussion.

Frege's Puzzle is About Identity After All

Many philosophers have argued or taken for granted that Frege's puzzle has little or nothing to do with identity statements. I show that this is wrong, arguing that the puzzle can only be motivated relative to a thinker's beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the relevant object. The result is important, as it suggests that the puzzle can be solved, not by a semantic theory of names or referring expressions as such, but simply by a theory of identity statements. To show this, I sketch a framework for developing solutions of this sort. I also consider how this result could be implemented by two influential solutions to Frege's puzzle, Perry's referential‐reflexivism and Fine's semantic relationism.

Indistinguishable Senses

AbstractFregeanism and Relationism are competing families of solutions to Frege's Puzzle, and by extension, competing theories of propositional representation. My aim is to clarify what is at stake between them by characterizing and evaluating a Relationist argument. Relationists claim that it is cognitively possible for distinct token propositional attitudes to be, in a sense, qualitatively indistinguishable: to differ in no intrinsic representational features. The idea of an ‘intrinsic representational feature’ is not, however, made especially clear in the argument. I clarify it here and, having done so, offer reason to doubt the argument. This will put us in a position to draw some lessons about the relation between object‐directed and representation‐internal aspects of cognitive significance.

The Logic of Opacity

We explore the view that Frege's puzzle is a source of straightforward counterexamples to Leibniz's law. Taking this seriously requires us to revise the classical logic of quantifiers and identity; we work out the options, in the context of higher‐order logic. The logics we arrive at provide the resources for a straightforward semantics of attitude reports that is consistent with the Millian thesis that the meaning of a name is just the thing it stands for. We provide models to show that some of these logics are non‐degenerate.

Relational approaches to Frege's puzzle

AbstractFrege's puzzle is a fundamental challenge for accounts of mental and linguistic representation. This piece surveys a family of recent approaches to the puzzle that posit representational relations. I identify the central commitments of relational approaches and present several arguments for them. I also distinguish two kinds of relationism—semantic relationism and formal relationism—corresponding to two conceptions of representational relations. I briefly discuss the consequences of relational approaches for foundational questions about propositional attitudes, intentional explanation, and compositionality.

Names of Truth Bearers, and “That”‐Clauses: A Dilemma for Millians

AbstractMillianism is the doctrine according to which the semantic content of a proper name is exhausted by its referent. This article raises and attempts to solve a dilemma for Millians: either a proper name of a truth bearer is in turn a truth bearer (which seems inadmissible); or having a truth bearer as semantic content is not sufficient for a linguistic expression to be a truth bearer (but then what is required for such a purpose?). As it will be shown in the manuscript, the dilemma does not arise with “that”‐clauses in the place of proper names, if “that”‐clauses are taken to be non‐Millian designators whose semantic content is not a truth bearer. An account of “that”‐clauses having such features and originating with Salmon, Frege's Puzzle, will be defended.

Informative Identities: A Challenge for Frege's Puzzle

Frege's puzzle about identity sentences has long challenged many philosophers to find a solution to it but also led other philosophers to object that the evidential datum it is grounded on is false. The present work is an elaboration of this second kind of reaction: it explains why Frege's puzzle seems to resist the traditional objection, giving voice to different and more elaborated presentations of the evidential datum, faithful to the spirit but not to the letter of Frege's puzzle. The final outcome is negative, no satisfactory formulation of the evidential datum is found and Frege's puzzle is challenged until a better formulation of it is found.

Frege's Puzzle for Perception

According to an influential variety of the representational view of perceptual experience—the singular content view—the contents of perceptual experiences include singular propositions partly composed of the particular physical object(s) a given experience is about or of. The singular content view faces well‐known difficulties accommodating hallucinations; I maintain that there is also an analogue of Frege's puzzle that poses a significant problem for this view. In fact, I believe that this puzzle presents difficulties for the theory that are unique to perception in that strategies that have been developed to respond to Frege's puzzle in the case of belief cannot be employed successfully in the case of perception. Ultimately, I maintain that this perceptual analogue of Frege's puzzle provides a compelling reason to reject the singular content view of perceptual experience.

Metalinguistic Descriptivism for Millians

Metalinguistic descriptivism is the view that proper names are semantically equivalent to descriptions featuring their own quotations (e.g., ‘Socrates’ means ‘the bearer of “Socrates”’). The present paper shows that Millians can actually accept an inferential version of this equivalence thesis without running afoul of the modal argument. Indeed, they should: for it preserves the explanatory virtues of more familiar forms of descriptivism while avoiding objections (old and new) to Kent Bach's nominal description theory. We can make significant progress on Frege's puzzle and Plato's beard without committing ourselves one way or the other on the semantic values of proper names. The view on offer can also be motivated by analogy with Tarski's schema T, inviting the idea that the equivalence between a name and the associated nominal description has more to do with the semantics of representational locutions than it does with names per se. My response to the modal argument exploits the Kripkean distinction between reference at a world and reference in a world, and can be accepted by metalinguistic descriptivists and Millians alike.

Frege's Puzzle and Arithmetical Formalism. Putting Things in Context

The paper discusses the emergence of Frege's puzzle and the introduction of the celebrated distinction between sense and reference in the context of Frege's logicist project. The main aim of the paper is to show that not logicism per se is mainly responsible for this introduction, but Frege's constant struggle against formalism. Thus, the paper enlarges the historical context, and provides a reconstruction of Frege's philosophical development from this broader perspective.

Solving Frege's Puzzle

Our actions are a product of mental states that represent how the world is, how we want it to be, and so forth. Such is central to our conception of ourselves as rational agents. I suppose it is possible that this conception is simply wrong. Perhaps there are, as eliminativists have argued, no such things as beliefs and desires. Or perhaps there are, but these states are merely relations to uninterpreted formulae in some internal computational system. I am going to set such questions aside here and assume that our ordinary conception of our ourselves is not wholly mistaken. The question I want to discuss concerns the role played in this conception by the notion of representation, that is, by representational content. The question is: How must we understand the contents of mental states such as beliefs and desires if those states are to play the causal and explanatory roles envisaged for them? 1

Frege's Puzzle and the Objects of Credence

The objects of credence are the entities to which credences are assigned for the purposes of a successful theory of credence. I use cases akin to Frege’s puzzle to argue against referentialism about credence: the view that objects of credence are determined by the objects and properties that one’s credence is directed at. I go on to develop a nonreferential account of the objects of credence in terms of sets of epistemically possible scenarios.

Frege's Puzzle and Descriptive Enrichment

As is (very) well known, Millians about proper names face a prima facie problem in accounting for our intuitions about instances of Frege’s puzzle. The version of the puzzle I have in mind is this: sometimes two simple sentences can differ only with respect to the substitution of coreferential proper names, and yet one sentence seems to express a trivial and a priori proposition, whereas the other seems to express a non-trivial and a posteriori proposition. Consider, for example,

Approaching Frege’s Puzzle

Approaching Frege’s Puzzle

Why Definite Descriptions Really are Referring Terms

According to Russell, '... the phi ...' means: 'exactly one object has phi and ... that object ...'. Strawson pointed out that, if somebody asked how many kings of France there were, it would be deeply inappropriate to respond by saying '... the king of France ...': the respondent appears to be presupposing the very thing that, under the circumstances, he ought to be asserting. But it would seem that if Russell's theory were correct, the respondent would be asserting exactly what he was asked to assert. So Russell's theory wrongly predicts that the respondent's answer will be appropriate. Russellians deal with this by saying that this anti-Russellian intuition embodies our reaction not to what is semantically encoded in the respondent's words, but to what is pragmatically imparted by them. So Russell's theory is correct: the fact that it appears wrong is due to the distorting effects of pragmatics. In this paper I show that pragmatic phenomena cannot possibly be responsible for the just mentioned anti-Russellian intuition. No matter how hard we try to put the blame on pragmatics, Russell's theory still falls short. It follows that defi nite descriptions really are what they appear to be: referring expressions. I argue that defi nite descriptions are complex demonstratives; and, within that framework, I deal with cases where defi nite descriptions appear to be functioning non-referentially. I also solve Frege's puzzle within the framework defi ned by my treatment of defi nite descriptions taken in conjunction with Kripke-Kaplan semantics.