Abstract

Frege's writings on meaning are often interpreted within the framework of possible worlds semantics. The resulting theories rely on contingency to account for a variety of linguistic phenomena, such as the behavior of expressions in propositional attitude contexts, or the idea that a definition might fix the reference of an expression without establishing its meaning. In this thesis, I interpret Frege's ideas within a different framework, to provide a semantic theory that is able to account for some of these same phenomena as they occur in a certain non-contingent language , where the possible worlds approach breaks down. ;The first part of the thesis is a detailed study of Frege's writings on sense identity, as well as some of the more modern literature on synonymy. I argue that instead of searching for a single relation of meaning equivalence among expressions, we should expect to find several different relations of meaning congruence. I claim that Frege was committed to this more flexible approach as well. To support my claim, I show that his standards for sense identity were strongly psychological; and then, relying on certain parallels between traditional ideas of definition and concept formation, I describe a problem about the senses of expressions introduced into a language through stipulative definitions. In the second part of the thesis, I develop a simple model of senses as procedures. I then use this model to deal with the problem about the senses of defined expressions set out earlier, and to deal also with the clash between Frege's compositional idea that the sense of a complete expression is assembled from the senses of its parts, and his decompositional idea that we can understand certain incomplete expressions only by first understanding complete expressions in which they occur