Analytic semantics got its start when Frege pointed out differences in cognitive content between sentences that in some good sense “say the same.” Frege put cognitive content (in the form of sense) at the heart of semantic content. Most prefer nowadays to see cognitive contents as generated by semantic contents in context; a sentence's cognitive significance is an aspect rather of the information imparted by its use. I argue for a particular version of this (...) idea. Semantic contents generate cognitive contents by operating levers in a larger piece of machinery, involving also the presupposition P one is leaning on and the subject matter M under discussion. A sentence's cognitive content is what its literal-content-restricted-to-P-worlds says about M. It's by triggering different presuppositions and/or different subject matters that coreferential names make their distinctive mark on a sentence's felt information value. (shrink)

Frege introduced the distinction between sense and reference to account for the information conveyed by identity statements. We can put the point like this: if the meaning of a term is exhausted by what it stands for, then how can 'a =a' and 'a =b' differ in meaning? Yet it seems they do, for someone who understands all the terms involved would not necessarily judge that a =b even though they judged that a =a. It seems that 'a =b' just (...) says something more than the trivial ’a = a' - it seems to contain more information, in some sense of 'information'. So either we have to add something to explain this extra information, or sever the very plausible links between meaning and understanding. This is what some writers have called 'Frege's Puzzle' It is undeniable that there is a phenomenon here to be explained, and it was Frege's insight to see the need for its explanation. But how should we explain it? Frege's idea was to add another semantic notion - Sinn, or Sense -— to account for the information conveyed. Sense is part of the meaning of an expression: it is the 'cognitive value' of the expression, or that ’wherein the mode of presentation is contained' (Frege 1957 p.57). Sense has a role to play in systematically determining the meanings of complex expressions, and ultimately in fixing the contents of judgements. It is the senses of whole sentences — Gedanken or Thoughts - which are candidates for truth and falsehood, and which are thus the objects of our propositional attitudes. Of course, introducing the notion of sense in this way does not, by itself, tell us what sense is. It only imposes a condition on a theory of meaning (and ultimately) belief: that it must account for distinctions in cognitive value or 'mode of presentation' (this is not a trivial thesis —- some philosophers today would deny that an explanation of Frege's Puzzle must occur within semantics or the theory of meaning: see Salmon 1985). In this paper I want to explore one way of meeting this condition for the theory of names in natural language, by examining Kripke's well-known 'Puzzle about Belief' (Kripke 1979).. (shrink)

Frege continues by explaining what bothered him in the Begriffsschrift, and motivated his treatment of identity in that work.2 He goes on to criticize that account. By the end of the paragraph, he has introduced his key concept of sinn, abandonning not only the Begriffsschrift account of identity, but its basical semantical framework. In the Begriffsschrift Frege’s main semantic concept was content [Inhalt ]. Already in the Begriffsschrift, he is struggling with this concept. In §3 he..

Frege puzzles exploit cognitive differences between co-referential terms. Traditionally, they were handled by some version of Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, which avoided disruptive consequences for epistemology. However, the Fregean programme did not live up to its original promise, and was undermined by the development of theories of direct reference; for semantic purposes, its prospects now look dim. In particular, well-known analogues of Frege puzzles concern pairs of uncontentious synonyms; attempts to deal with them by distinguishing (...) idiolects or postulating ‘narrow contents’ or elaborate forms of context-sensitivity are inadequate or semantically implausible. Although ascriptions of knowledge, belief, and other attitudes are ubiquitous in epistemology, epistemologists have not properly come to terms with the surprising consequences of anti-Fregean semantic accounts of attitude ascriptions. In ‘A Puzzle about Belief ’, Saul Kripke shows that natural-seeming disquotational principles for ascribing belief lead to apparently unacceptable consequences, including outright contradictions, in problem cases. Such disquotation principles, I argue, are best regarded not as conceptual connections but just as heuristics in the psychological sense, quick and easy ways of assessing belief ascriptions, usually accurate under normal conditions but far from 100% reliable. I discuss similar heuristics for ascribing knowledge and other attitudes. That the principles have a merely heuristic status need not be pre-theoretically manifest to their users. This view vindicates Kripke’s conclusion that it would be wrong-headed to draw semantic conclusions from Frege puzzles. I discuss the epistemological consequences of an anti-Fregean approach to Frege puzzles, including for Kripke’s cases of the contingent a priori and the necessary a posteriori, but also for evidence, for epistemic modalities, and for epistemic and subjective conceptions of probability. Anna Mahtani’s recent identification of Frege puzzles for the ex ante Pareto Principle as used in welfare economics provides an interesting example. I suggest a model-building methodology as the most promising way of handling at least some of the difficulties. A final issue is the choice between different anti-Fregean approaches to semantics, from very coarse-grained intensional approaches on which sentences express functions from possible worlds to truth-values to more fine-grained hyperintensional approaches on which sentences express functions from possible or impossible worlds to truth-values or else Russellian structured propositions. Some of the hyperintensional theories violate semantic compositionality. More generally, since our attitude ascriptions rely on heuristics, they should be expected to exhibit some level of error; although hyperintensional approaches may be able slightly to reduce the level of postulated error, they do so at the cost of vastly increased theoretical complexity, and so have weak explanatory power. Methodologically, a simple intensional approach does better. (shrink)

Equality1 gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer. Is it a relation? A relation between objects, or between names or signs of objects? In my Begriffsschrift I assumed the latter. The reasons which seem to favour this are the following: a = a and a = b are obviously statements of differing cognitive value; a = a holds a priori and, according to Kant, is to be labeled analytic, while statements of the form a (...) = b often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledge and cannot always be established a priori. The discovery that the rising sun is not new every morning, but always the same, was one of the most fertile astronomical discoveries. Even to-day the identification of a small planet or a comet is not always a matter of course. Now if we were to regard equality as a relation between that which the names ‘a’ and ‘b’ designate, it would seem that a = b could not differ from a = a (i.e. provided a = b is true). A relation would thereby be expressed of a thing to itself, and indeed one in which each thing stands to itself but to no other thing. What is intended to be said by a = b seems to be that the signs or names ‘a’ and ‘b’ designate the same thing, so that those signs themselves would be under discussion; a relation between them would be asserted. But this relation would hold between the names or signs only in so far as they named or designated something. It would be mediated by the connexion of each of the two signs with the same designated thing. But this is arbitrary. Nobody can be forbidden to use any arbitrarily producible event or object as a sign for something. In that case the sentence a = b would no longer refer to the subject matter, but only to its mode of designation; we would express no proper knowledge by its means. But in many cases this is just what we want to do. If the sign ‘a’ is distinguished from the sign ‘b’ only as object (here, by means of its shape), not as sign (i.e. not by the manner in which it designates something), the cognitive value of a = a becomes essentially equal to that of a = b, provided a = b is true.. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:RUSSELLS ARGUMENT AGAINST FREGE'S SENSE-REFERENCE DISTINCTION PAWEL TURNAu Philosophy I Jagiellonian University Cracow, Poland I n "On Denoting"l Russell argued that Frege's theory of sense and reference was an "inextricable tangle", but, ironically, many readers found the argument even more knotry. In an effort to make sense of it, commentators were often driven to attribute to Russell quite obvious and simple fallacies. A different approach was taken by Peter (...) Geach, who suggested that Russell's argument could be given a consistent reading if it were construed as arguing, not against Frege's theory, but against Russell's own earlier theory, which he put forward in The Principles of Mathematics. It is not an implausible hypothesis, considering how prone Russell was to misrepresent' other philosophers' views and read his own powerful ideas into their writings. In order to justifY Geach's hypothesis properly, one would have to show the crucial difference between Russell's and Frege's theories that made only one of them susceptible to the attack in "On Denoting ". Russell explicitly considered the two theories to be "very nearly the same"; this self-interpretation would have to be questioned. Geach's hypothesis would be further strengthened by providing an actual exegesis of the "On Denoting" argument as directed against The Principles ofMathematics theory. In this paper 1 will try to accomplish both of these tasks. Russell is often accused of confusing use and mention. The accusation is not fair, however. It is true that he does not insist on this distinction; he does not employ it extensively. But he is certainly Russell's Argument against Frege's Distinction 53 aware of it; he simply does not think that it is an important logical distinction. Today this view may seem almost incomprehensible, but that only shows the strength of Frege's influence on our ideas. There are two striking symptoms of Russell's lack of concern for the use-mention distinction: firstly, he does not observe the convention which says that putting an expression in quotation marks produces a name of that expression; secondly, he does not feel any need to employ the pair of terms "sentence" and "proposition", but contents himself with the latter only. The claim about Russell's use of inverted commas needs to be proved; I will come to that later. Russell's assertions are often ambiguous between use and mention of expressions. For example, he asserts that "propositions do not contain words" (PaM, p. 47). However, a few pages later, he speaks of propositions that contain the phrase "any number" (p. 53). If this is not to be self-contradictory, then either the term "proposition" must sometimes signifY a linguistic expression, or the term "phrase" must sometimes be understood without implying that a phrase consists of words. This ambiguity is openly admitted in a later article, where he writes: [we shall be concerned with] the distinction between verbs and substantives, or, more correctly, between the objects denoted by verbs and the objects denoted by substantives. Since this more correct expression is long and cumbrous, I shall generally use the shorter expression to mean the same thing. Thus, when I speak of verbs, I mean the object denoted by verbs, and similarly for substantives.2. Russell's attitude towards the distinction between use and mention is not unjustified. It has its reason in his view oflanguage and the subject -matter of logic. In Russell's view, the subject-matter of logic has nothing to do with language. Words, both spoken and written, are entirely outside its realm. Logic, just as other sciences (except linguistics ), is concerned with the entities indicated by words, and not with words themselves. Even the relation of indicating, which holds between words and things in the world, is of no interest to it: "mean1 In Lf(, pp. 39-56. russ.lI: the Journal of the Bertrand Russell Archives McMaster Univecsity Library Press n.s. 11 (summer 1991): 51- 66 ISSN 0036-o16~ 2 B. Russell, "On the Relations of Universals and Particulars", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, n.s. 12 (r9II-12): 1-24; in Lf(, pp. 103-24 (at 107-8). 54 PAWEL TURNAU Russell's Argument... (shrink)

I take issue with Glezakos’s explanation of why Frege’s puzzle is un-puzzling. On her view, Frege’s statement – how can sentences of the form a=a and a=b, if true, differ in cognitive value if they express the same semantic content/are made true by the same object’s self-identity? – should not be considered any puzzling either because it is on the whole circular, or because, neutrally stated, it cannot even be set up. I argue against this that (...) if, as she takes it, Frege’s statement is “problematic” it is not for the reasons she gives, but because it rests upon a couple of questionable assumptions: i) there is no ambiguity as to which aspect of the sign (in its relation to the referent) is relevant to a neutral statement of the puzzle ii) it is of the (sentence) forms themselves one may sensibly say they differ in cognitive value. (shrink)

This paper will critically examine two solutions to Frege’s puzzle: the Millian-Russellian solution proposed by Salmon and Braun, which invokes non-semantic modes of presentation (guises, ways of believing or the like); and Fine’s relationalist solution, which appeals to semantic coordination. Special attention will be devoted to discussing the conception of modes of presentation as mental files and to elucidating the nature of coordination. A third solution to Frege’s puzzle will be explored which, like Salmon’s and Braun’s, (...) adopts the Millian-Russellian semantics but, like Fine’s, involves coordination instead of modes of presentation; however, coordination will not be conceived as a semantic relation but as a cognitive and subjective relation, which provides no contribution to semantic content. This novel Millian-Russellian account involving cognitive coordination will be labelled cognitive relationism. (shrink)

In formulating the puzzle about cognitive significance in ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Frege rejects the approach he suggested in the Begriffsschrift on the ground that if the utterance of a sentence of the form a = b is understood as ‘a’ and ‘b’ referring to the same object we lose the subject matter. In this note, we will show how Frege’s concerns can be understood and circumvented.

Frege’s puzzling remarks on the beginning of On Sense and Reference challenge us to explain how true identity sentences of the form a = a can differ in cognitive value from sentences of the form a = b when they are made true by the same object’s self-identity. Some philosophers (e.g. Almog, Glezakos and Paganini) suggest that the puzzle cannot be set up in the context of natural languages since natural sentences, unlike those of regimented formal ones, do (...) not wear their logical properties on their sleeves. In this paper we argue that, on the contrary, there exists a notion of coordination between names which is apt to track the relevant logical properties of natural sentences and therefore to set up the puzzle in natural languages. Frege’s puzzle is here to stay. (shrink)

Within contemporary philosophy of mind, it is taken for granted that externalist accounts of meaning and mental content are, in principle, orthogonal to the matter of whether cognition itself is bound within the biological brain or whether it can constitutively include parts of the world. Accordingly, Clark and Chalmers (1998) distinguish these varieties of externalism as ‘passive’ and ‘active’ respectively. The aim here is to suggest that we should resist the received way of thinking about these dividing lines. With reference (...) to Brandom’s (1994; 2000; 2008) broad semantic inferentialism, we show that a theory of meaning can be at the same time a variety of active externalism. While we grant that supporters of other varieties of content externalism (e.g., Putnam 1975 and Burge 1986) can deny active externalism, this is not an option for semantic inferentialists: On this latter view, the role of the environment (both in its social and natural form) is not ‘passive’ in the sense assumed by the alternative approaches to content externalism. (shrink)

So-called 'Frege cases' pose a challenge for anyone who would hope to treat the contents of beliefs (and similar mental states) as Russellian propositions: It is then impossible to explain people's behavior in Frege cases without invoking non-intentional features of their mental states, and doing that seems to undermine the intentionality of psychological explanation. In the present paper, I develop this sort of objection in what seems to me to be its strongest form, but then offer a response to it. (...) I grant that psychological explanation must invoke non-intentional features of mental states, but it is of crucial importance which such features must be referenced. -/- It emerges from a careful reading of Frege's own view that we need only invoke what I call 'formal' relations between mental states. I then claim that referencing such 'formal' relations within psychological explanation does not undermine its intentionality in the way that invoking, say, neurological features would. The central worry about this view is that either (a) 'formal' relations bring narrow content in through back door or (b) 'formal' relations end up doing all the explanatory work. Various forms of each worry are discussed. The crucial point, ultimately, is that the present strategy for responding to Frege cases is not available either to the 'psycho-Fregean', who would identify the content of a belief with its truth-value, nor even to someone who would identify the content of a belief with a set of possible worlds. It requires the sort of rich semantic structure that is distinctive of Russellian propositions. There is therefore no reason to suppose that the invocation of 'formal' relations threatens to deprive content of any work to do. (shrink)

Some years ago, Howard Wettstein provided an original defense of the New Theory of Reference (NTR), the doctrine that singular terms such as names and indexicals are directly referential terms (DRTs), contributing only their reference to the truth-conditions of the tokened sentence they occur in. Wettstein maintained that in order to be semantically adequate, NTR does not have to account for what he calls Frege’s data on cognitive significance, those puzzling facts about language that prompt one to think (...) that meaning entails more than reference to (real) objects. He later put forward another, apparently paradoxical, thesis, namely that whatever this cognitive significance that explains Frege’s data is, it cannot be reduced to the representations one has in one’s mind. In what follows, however, I will first apply the notion of referential anaphorical transfer to mixed contexts in order to show that a New Theorist has to reject Wettstein’s initial thesis as it stands, although she may endorse a weaker version of it, one that especially tallies with his second thesis. I will further argue that, insofar as rejecting Wettstein’s initial thesis does not force the New Theorist to revert to a representional conception of cognitive significance, in particular one based on the notion of a mental file, the latter thesis is absolutely correct. It is thus fitted to become a cornerstone of the New Theory, whatever form of non-mentalistic interpretation the New Theorist might wish to give to the notion of cognitive significance. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to give a detailed reconstruction of Frege's solution to his puzzle about the cognitive function of truth, which is this: On the one hand, the concept of truth seems to play an essential role in acquiring knowledge because the transition from the mere hypothetical assumption that p to the acknowledgement of its truth is a crucial step in acquiring the knowledge that p, while, on the other hand, this concept seems to be completely (...) redundant because the sense of the word 'true' does not make any essential contribution to the senses of the sentences in which it occurs. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.2 (2003) 161-167 [Access article in PDF] Social, Cognitive, and Neural Constraints on Subjectivity and Agency:Implications for Dissociative Identity Disorder Peter Q. Deeley In this commentary, I consider Matthew's argument after making some general observations about dissociative identity disorder (DID). In contrast to Matthew's statement that "cases of DID, although not science fiction, are extraordinary" (p. 148), I believe that there are natural analogs (...) of the disorder that, when considered, make it seem less puzzling and exotic. After discussing these examples, I examine the relations between social, cognitive, and neural processes supporting subjectivity and agency, to identify sources of personal identity in cases of DID that can be used as a basis for assessing Matthew's points against Behnke and Sinnott-Armstrong. I am not proposing a comprehensive theory, but rather identifying what I believe are components of such a theory. I then outline an approach to determining criminal responsibility in DID, drawing on analogies with other psychiatric disorders. Dissociative Identity Disorder DID is a disorder described in DSM-IV, which "is characterised by the presence of two or more distinct identities or personality states that recurrently take control of the individual's behaviour accompanied by an inability to recall important personal information that is too extensive to be explained by ordinary forgetfulness" (American Psychiatric Association, p. 519). Recognizing Personal Identity How is personal identity recognized in normal cognition? If we take personhood to involve recognition of continuity of social, psychological, and physical identity for a given individual, then such judgments are routinely made rapidly and automatically as an aspect of what has come to be termed social cognition (Adolphs 2003). There is likely to be considerable redundancy in [End Page 161] the types of information used to make judgments about whether a person is the same as one who was previously encountered, or perhaps heard about—for example, facial features, movement patterns, speech prosody, dress, speech content, gender, ethnicity, social role, among other features, all provide information about individual identity, and hence personhood. When uncertainty exists, it is likely to reflect a loss or alteration of cues that would ordinarily be used in a rapid, automatic, unexamined way (Adolphs 2003). In such extreme cases (for example, severe mental illness or disfigurement), the problem of identification becomes the subject of explicit reasoning (and hence of potential disagreement, because we then engage in post hoc rationalizations to establish criteria for determining personhood, whereas normally we rely on essentially automatic, implicit abilities that work in most circumstances, some of which make little use of linguistic representations and formal reasoning—for example, individual facial identity recognition, which may occur as quickly as 170 ms after stimulus onset [Adolphs 2003]). Nevertheless, examining our judgments and intuitions in cases that force us to explicitly consider whether personal identity is preserved may provide analogies and clues for how we should proceed with DID. Let us consider, then, some natural analogs of DID. Natural Analogs of DID Method Acting I suggest that method acting is an analog of DID (Manderino 1985). Method acting refers to an approach to acting training and performance in which emphasis is placed on intensely imagining and identifying with the mental life of the character being portrayed. Training courses and manuals list many techniques and practices that can be used to facilitate absorption in a role, drawing on different kinds of memory—for example, experiential memories, memories of others, general knowledge (semantic memory), and memories of sensations and feelings, to creative a vivid sense of the subjective experience and actions of the character. Manderino, a method acting teacher, comments: "it is important to investigate the way in which your own mental makeup can improperly influence a character. Insecurities, self-consciousness, shyness or self-doubts can maintain a strong hold, and permitting any of these feelings to enter a performance is to remain the actor and not enter into the mental life of the character. For some, acting allows personal problems to be left behind, and they are thankful for the complete escape that... (shrink)

There is no doubt that social interaction plays an important role in language-learning, as well as in concept acquisition. In surprising contrast, social interaction makes only passing appearance in our most promising naturalistic theories of content. This is particularly true in the case of mental content (e.g., Cummins, 1996; Dretske, 1981, 1988; Fodor, 1987, 1990a; Millikan, 1984); and insofar as linguistic content derives from mental content (Grice, 1957), social interaction seems missing from our best naturalistic theories of both.1 In this (...) paper, I explore the ways in which even the most individualistic of theories of mental content can, and should, accommodate social effects. I focus especially on the way in which inferential relations, including those that are socially taught, influence language-learning and concept acquisition. I argue that these factors affect the way subjects conceive of mental and linguistic content. Such effects have a dark side: the social and inferential processes in question give rise to misleading intuitions about content itself. They create the illusion that content and inferential relations are more deeply intertwined than they actually are. This illusion confounds an otherwise attractive solution to what is known as ‘Frege’s puzzle’ (Salmon, 1986). I.. (shrink)

Description: The book points to a new logic of singular designators based upon a close analysis of work in the area by contemporary philosophers of language. The philosophers range from Frege, Russell, Quine, Strawson and Dummett to Kripke, Hintikka, Plantinga, Kaplan, Donnellan, Searle and Burge. It is generally taken for granted that proper names are rigid designators, having no meaning content, which explains their intranslatability into other languages. However, they do have their modes of presentation that must constitute their sense. (...) There is little room for contradiction here in admitting that proper names have a sense, which does not amount to meaning. One of the advantages of this position is that it blocks the emergence of the Kripkean puzzle about belief by accepting different belief contents corresponding to a variation in the senses of the names involved. Is Kripke's distinction between rigid and non-rigid designators finally valid' the author asks, questioning the corollaries that are supposed to follow from the distinction, viz., that proper names do not have descriptive backing, and that there are contingent a priori truths. He draws our attention to predicative occurrences of proper names, in the modal context, matching corresponding occurrences of definite descriptions. His explanation of contingency, where proper names or definite descriptions are involved, is innovatively straight, simple and broad-based, at par with situations having ordinary predicates. Parts of the book have taken a final shape in response to comments by Strawson, Dummett and Burge. (shrink)

We can think about ourselves in a variety of ways, but only some of the thoughts that we entertain about ourselves will be thoughts which we know concern ourselves. I call these first-person thoughts, and the component of such thoughts that picks out the object about which one is thinking—oneself—the self-concept. In this thesis I am concerned with providing an account of the content of the self-concept. The challenge is to provide an account that meets two conditions on first-person thought. (...) The account must show how we are aware of ourselves when we entertain first-person thoughts, so that we have an account that establishes the cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. But, in addition, this awareness must be as robust as the thinker’s ability to entertain first-person thoughts if our account is to respect the guaranteed referential success of the self-concept. I introduce both the subject matter of the thesis, and the constraints on a satisfactory account of that subject matter in the first chapter. In the second chapter I then set up a further problem: much of our self-knowledge is knowledge of our current mental states and it is often argued that we know about and can ascribe those mental states on the basis of introspection alone. The first constraint on an account of first-person thought described in the preceding paragraph requires that we be aware of ourselves in some way if our thoughts are to have the special cognitive significance of first-person thoughts. Yet, I argue, we neither do nor can introspectively observe a subject of thought and experience when we come to know about our mental states and experiences. The failure of introspection to supply us with perceptual information about a subject of thought presents us with the further potential problem. According to Fregean semantics sense determines reference: we count on the content of the elements of thought to determine the reference of terms that are used to express those elements. If we do not introspectively observe a subject of thought then we seem to be at a loss to account for the concept and we are at risk of having to accept that neither the self-concept nor the first-person pronoun are referential. In the remainder of my thesis I consider various responses that we can offer to this problem. First, I examine whether we can avoid the problem with an alternative account of first-person reference according to which reference is fixed by a reflexive rule, and whether we can also base an account of first-person thought on this account of first-person reference. Secondly, I look at the descriptivist view of first-person thought which could potentially provide both an account of first-person thought and first-person reference. These two suggestions must be rejected on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the special cognitive significance of first-person thought. A third approach to first-person thought argues that we employ an objective self-concept when we think about ourselves, a concept that is informed by bodily experience, rather than by introspective observation of a subject. Yet such an account cannot make sense of first-person thoughts in which we question our own embodiment. Lastly I consider whether it is possible to explain the cognitive significance of first-person thought in terms of non-conceptual first-person contents. (shrink)

Resolution of Frege's Puzzle by denying that synonym substitution in logical truths preserves sentence sense and explaining how logical form has semantic import. Intensional context substitutions needn't preserve truth, because intercepting doesn't preserve sentence meaning. Intercepting is nonuniformly substituting a pivotal term in syntactically secured truth. Logical sentences and their synonym interceptions share factual content. Semantic content is factual content in synthetic predications, but not logical sentences and interceptions. Putnam's Postulate entails interception nonsynonymy. Syntax and vocabulary explain only (...) the factual content of synthetic predications; extrasentential reality explains their truth. Construction of logical factual content explains logical necessity. Terms retain objectual reference, but logical syntax preempts their function in explaining truth. Grasping the facts GG/gg assert entails understanding this. Understanding what GH states requires some recognition that GH must be true just because GmH, and GmH state an empirical fact. GH is standardly used to express that fact. Church's Test exposes puzzles. QMi sentences, and QTi sentences are metalogical necessities, true by syntax. Intercepting QMi creates empirical QM contingencies. Synonymy turns semantic contingencies into metalogical and lexical necessities. That transformation is syntactic, via the syntactic duality of definite descriptions. GmH is a contingent copredication, and a lexically necessary referential identity with rigidly codesignating indexicals. Metalogical sentences may be about expressional matter or what it expresses. GG has GG's semantic content, but the referent expression switches. Metalogical syntax secures truth by self-referential quotational indexing. Metalogically, referents are identified with intrasentential replica. Extrasentential identifications are metalogically irrelevant. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This is the 1991 (2nd) edition of the 1986 book (MIT Press), considered to be the classic defense of Millianism. The nature of the information content of declarative sentences is a central topic in the philosophy of language. The natural view that a sentence like "John loves Mary" contains information in which two individuals occur as constituents is termed the naive theory, and is one that has been abandoned by most contemporary scholars. This theory was refuted originally by philosopher Gottlob (...) Frege. His argument that the naive theory did not work is termed Frege's puzzle, and his rival account of information content is termed the orthodox theory. In this detailed study, Nathan Salmon defends a version of the naive theory and presents a proposal for its extension that provides a better picture of information content than the orthodox theory gives. He argues that a great deal of what has generally been taken for granted in the philosophy of language over the past few decades is either mistaken or unsupported, and consequently, much current research is focused on the wrong set of questions. Salmon dissolves Frege's puzzle as it is usually formulated and demonstrates how it can be reconstructed and strengthened to yield a more powerful objection to the naive theory. He then defends the naive theory against the new Frege puzzle by presenting an idea that yields both a surprisingly rich and powerful extension of the naive theory and a better picture of information content than that of the original orthodox theory. Nathan Salmon is Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Barbara. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that a number of influential Millian responses to Frege’s puzzle, which consist in denying that Frege’s data apply to natural languages, are not viable if logic is to play its role in legitimizing the logical appraisal of rational subjects. A notion of validity which does justice to the normativity of logic must make room for a distinction between valid inferences and enthymemes. I discuss the prospects of formal, relevant and manifest validity as (...) candidates for a notion which complies with this desideratum. Their success, or failure is argued to hang on the viability of a semantical account of de jure co-reference, which is in tension with standard Millian tenets. I conclude that these Millian theories face the following dilemma: either accept that there is no notion of logical validity which makes logic normative for reasoning, thus jeopardizing our well entrenched practices of rational appraisal; or accept that de jure co-reference is a real semantical relation. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:NEWMAN'S PSYCHOLOGICAL DISCOVERY: THE ILLATIVE SENSE (Continued) VI THE FACULTIES OF COGNITION AND APPETITION Since the Grammar of Assent gives us a phenorhenological analysis of the art of thinking and often refers to the influence of other faculties in our reasoning processes, it will be very instructive to examine what the author holds about our faculties of cognition and appetition. This will make us better acquainted with the nature (...) of the illative sense. I. THE SENSES 1. The External Senses and their Objects. We had already arrived at the conclusion that Newman rejects the mere subjectivity of our knowledge. When he writes about this matter he explicitly deals with sensation or sensuous cognition. Although he takes exception to the word "immediate perception," 1 we may nevertheless call him an adherent of direct or immediate realism according to Scholastic terminology, because he emphatically excludes the intervention of a reasoning process from sense perception and uses the term "mediate perception" only to express the instrumentality of experience. In this meaning our perception of external objects is mediate or indirect indeed.2 The fact is that as early as 1839 he wrote in his University Sermons: "Of the material we have direct knowledge through the senses"3 and in 1843: "The senses are direct, immediate, and ordinary informants, and act spontaneously without any will or effort on our part."4 On the importance of sense perception for our mental activities he writes in a series of hitherto unpublished notes, entitled Elements of Thought:6 "I grant or I assume that the soul would not think without some external stimulus; that if it were cut off from all communication from the external world, it would pass this life in a sort of torpor... But then, as soon as it is roused, it reflects upon itself, and thereby gains a number of ideas..." 1. See supra V, 14.2. Supra V, 14.3. P. 205. 4.P. 303 ; cf. Gramm., p. 260. 5.See the unpublished Philosophical Papers, note Fcbr. 24, 1859. 40 DR. ZENO, OJM. CAP.41 Apart from the passages already referred to, Newman nowhere enlarges on the doctrine about the senses. He does not speak about the distinctions between sensible objects; he does not explain the difference between sensation and perception, and uses those terms promiscuously.6 There are no statements on the subject which contradict current Scholastic notions, although sometimes his vague terminology may be an occasion for misunderstandings. For instance, some passages in connection with "images" and "impressions," when read apart from the context, would appear to imply that he identifies them with the Scholastic species a sensibili accepta. However, we shall show further on that. Newman means something quite different. He deals with these species and the so-called sensibilia per acci· dens by the way when describing our knowledge of God7 and teaching that we have evidence of the presence of individuals or substances in the phenomena which occur to our senses. We picture those things to ourselves in those phenomena. They are like pictures, he says, but at the same time "they give us no exact measure or character of the unknown things beyond them." "Therefore when we speak of our having a picture of the things which are perceived through the senses, we mean a certain representation, true as far as it goes, but not adequate." 2. The Internal Senses and their Objects. Newman nowhere gives a distinction between external and internal senses, but nevertheless he speaks about those faculties of the mind which by the Scholastics are called the internal senses. These philosophers distinguish a common sense or rather a central sense (sensus communis), which unites the impressions of the external senses into one whole, makes us conscious of the conditions of our body and notifies to us the sensations of our external as well as internal senses; — the imagination or the faculty which preserves and reproduces things perceived; — the sensuous memory, i. e., the power to retain and to reproduce sense images; — and the vis aestimativa or the instinctive faculty, which discovers without any intellectual means, what is good and what is bad for our welfare. 6.It would seem that he generally... (shrink)

The first page of Frege’s classic “Uber Sinn und Bedeutung” sets for more than a hundred years now the agenda for much of semantics and the philosophy of mind. It presents a purported puzzle whose solution is said to call upon the “entities” of semantics (meanings) and psychological explanation (Psychological states, beliefs, concepts). The paper separates three separate alleged puzzles that can be read into Frege’s data. It then argues that none are genuine puzzles. In turn, much of (...) the Frege-driven theoretical development, motivated as an inevitable “solution”, is thrown into doubt. (shrink)

In the paper, I discuss a possibility of defending the Direct Reference theory from its most dangerous threaten which is the notorious Frege's puzzle. I discuss two possible ways of doing that. First is based on King's theory of propositions as facts. I show that tools provided by King's theory are not enough to solve the puzzle. More promising is a method supported by new Soames's theory of propositions as cognitive event-types. I try to show that this framework allows (...) us to develop a satisfying solution of the puzzle, which focuses​ on the notion of the cognitive value of the sentence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:“An Immoderate Taste for Truth”: Censoring History in Baudelaire’s “Les bijoux”E. S. Burt (bio)In May 1949, a French Court of Appeals reversed an 1857 decision condemning six poems from Les fleurs du mal for obscenity, in a signal case of a public lifting of a ban against some lyric poems. 1 Among the several interesting features of this case not the least is the decision to proceed against the (...) work in the first place. For lyric poetry does not appear an attractive target for censorship. Its subject matter and formalism remove it far enough from the experience of most readers that Gustave Flaubert, fresh from his troubles with the court over Madame Bovary, could express his surprise at the government’s attack: “This is new,” he wrote to Baudelaire, “this pursuit of a volume of verse.” While Flaubert’s comment was in point of fact inaccurate, he puts his finger on a problem worth considering. 2 Here we have a work that must seem naturally exempt from state intervention, by virtue of a deliberate retreat from risky political subjects, and it nonetheless did get censored by the state. Can anything be learned about “normal” state censorship from this exceptional case? [End Page 19]A key factor in the government’s decision to pursue the book, according to the prosecutor Pinard, was that these poems would prove accessible to a large audience: 3 “An immoral book that had no chance of being read or understood would not be pursued” [1208], he states. In his argument, as in the judgment by the court that the condemned poems “lead necessarily to the exciting of the senses by a coarse realism offensive to modesty” [1182], the assumption is that the work is extraordinarily available, its pictures immediately referable to ordinary experience. In the six condemned poems, language is judged to be not a veil but a tool, and a sex tool at that. “Despite an effort of style” [1182], the poetic situation—in most of the poems that of the boudoir—is painted in a language insufficiently flowery. 4A further interesting feature in the case is that when it comes up again, under DeGaulle’s Fourth Republic, the court summarily dismisses the 1857 judgment of coarse realism as just one possible interpretation, and a forced one at that. Instead, the 1949 court finds that the poems are self-referential, symbolic entities that do not represent ordinary experience:If some pictures, on account of their originality, were able to alarm some minds upon first publication and appeared to the first judges as offensive to morality, such an appraisal, attaching itself only to a realistic interpretation of the poems and neglecting their symbolic meaning, has proved to be of an arbitrary character, unratified by public opinion or by the judgment of the literary world.[St. John-Stevas 249]The shocking representations of 1857, outraging morality, are now understood to deliver the Wordsworthian “shock of mild surprise” by which we recognize the original work of art. In 1949, the poems are precious artifacts; their language is not realistic but symbolical; its sensuous forms reveal an inner, spiritual meaning.A crucial resemblance can be discerned between the actions taken by the two courts: both make their judgments in terms of a “reading pact,” a set of “artificial rules” [1206] that are presumed to govern reading and to have currency in the context. Les fleurs gets policed in the name of this generic purity, with the prosecutor Pinard calling “the judge... a sentinel who must not let the border be crossed” [1206] and the 1949 decision confirming the opinion of the literary world that the supposed transgression against public morality was in point of fact a transformation in the rules regulating the narrow confines of lyric poetry. 5This concern that texts be framed by a reading pact aimed at constraining their interpretation is worth considering in any discussion of censorship that wants to move from the level of pragmatics to that of theory. It leads to queries about the possibility of getting rid of state censorship entirely and about the state’s interest, as guardian and overseer of the archive, in the institutionalization and... (shrink)

This paper provides a new approach to a family of outstanding logical and semantical puzzles, the most famous being Frege's puzzle. The three main reductionist theories of propositions (the possible-worlds theory, the propositional-function theory, the propositional-complex theory) are shown to be vulnerable to Benacerraf-style problems, difficulties involving modality, and other problems. The nonreductionist algebraic theory avoids these problems and allows us to identify the elusive nondescriptive, non-metalinguistic, necessary propositions responsible for the indicated family of puzzles. The algebraic approach is also (...) used to defend antiexistentialism against existentialist prejudices. The paper closes with a suggestion about how this theory of content might enable us to give purely semantic (as opposed to pragmatic) solutions to the puzzles based on a novel formulation of the principle of compositionality. (shrink)

Frege'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.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Commentary on “Minds, Memes, and Multiples”Timothy Sprigge (bio)In his paper “Minds, Memes and Multiples” Stephen Clark discusses the problem of multiple personality, to some considerable extent in response to Stephen Braude’s recent book First Person Plural, with eloquence, subtlety and some apposite historical references. I am delighted to have been asked to make some comments on it, developing some points I made in discussion when Professor Clark read his (...) paper at a seminar in Edinburgh.Multiple personality is certainly a fascinating subject on which anyone with views about the nature of human persons does well to cast an eye. I am grateful to both Clark and Braude for having raised my awareness of it. Clearly, Clark has been persuaded by Braude of the reality of the phenomenon as something more than just a form of extreme role-playing or play acting, 1 but also agrees with him that there is an ultimate single self behind the genuine multiplicity (Clark 1969; Braude 1991). What this ultimate self is Clark seeks to explain by reference to a single “light” which illumines all the variety (extreme in the case of multiple personality), of ideas, thoughts, emotions etc. by which we are variously swayed.Let us for simplicity take the case where the putatively distinct “persons” associated with the one human organism are three. Prima facie, there are, in these cases, three distinct centers of consciousness associated with a single human organism each capable turn and turn about of being the dominant one (that which is using the first person pronoun out aloud to speak of itself and whose desires and wishes are what is most immediately expressed in behavior).There seem to be three main features of genuine and full blooded multiple personality (as described most famously—I shall assume correctly—in Morton Prince’s The Dissociation of a Personality and Thigpen and Cleckley’s The Three Faces of Eve). First, the different centers of consciousness exhibit very different personalities, so different that the individual seems in some ways even physically altered according as to which is dominant. By personality here I mean a system of character traits rather than the principle of personal identity, whatever we think that to be. The expression “multiple personality” tends rather to blur the distinction between personality in this sense and person. Someone can change quite radically in personality without ceasing to be the same person—or at least that is how we ordinarily look at it. Second, at least one of them does not “remember” the experiences and conscious behavior of at least one of the others, while one of them does. If they really are different persons, some would think that “memory” is the wrong word here. But I am using “memory” to refer to any cognitive relation sufficiently akin to that in which we stand to our own past experiences when we [End Page 31] remember them. Third, they co-exist in the sense that at least one other of the centers is often “looking on” at the contents and public manifestations of the then dominant one.Another important factor is that they have attitudes to one another, often of hostility, which seem much more like the attitudes one can have to another person than one normally does to oneself. However, important as this is, it should not be taken as part of the definition of multiple personality, since so many of these attitudes are ones many people direct at themselves, (e.g. self-hatred and self-pity). To say that these are distinct from the hatred and pity felt towards others just because they are self-directed seems rather to beg the question.It seems to me that unless the first three conditions are met, we do not have multiple personality in a full sense. I cannot consider all possible cases in which only one or two of the conditions are met but here are some examples. Suppose that the first condition is met but not the other two. Then we would have a person subjected to striking mood swings, each mood bringing with it a contrasting set of personal loves and hates, political opinions, aesthetic tastes, sporting enthusiasms, and... (shrink)

Stavroula Glezakos (2009) argues that Frege himself could not pose Frege’s puzzle without relying on the distinction between sense and reference, a distinction that the puzzle was supposed to motivate, not presuppose. In this paper I argue that there are still some puzzling questions about the informativeness of identity sentences, and I discuss a problem generated by the Fregean contention that one and the same proper name can have different senses for different speakers an issue that, in my view, (...) Frege should have puzzled more about. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Die Philosophische Logik Gottlob Freges. Ein Kommentar, mit den Texten des Vorworts zu Grundgesetze der Arithmetik und der Logischen Untersuchungen I–IVLeila HaaparantaWolfgang Künne. Die Philosophische Logik Gottlob Freges. Ein Kommentar, mit den Texten des Vorworts zu Grundgesetze der Arithmetik und der Logischen Untersuchungen I–IV. RoteReihe 30. Frankfurt: V. Klostermann, 2010. Pp. 840. Paper, €29.80.Frege’s thought has been a permanent point of interest among philosophers for several decades. (...) In the late sixties a few philosophers, such as Christian Thiel and Ignacio Angelelli, published studies on Frege’s logic, semantics, and metaphysics. In 1973 Michael Dummett’s work on Frege’s philosophy of language appeared, which held the stage for a long time. It presented Frege as a predecessor, even as a representative, of the analytic tradition. New approaches came up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, such as Hans Sluga’s work in 1980 and other studies, which paid special attention to Frege’s German background, where Kant played a significant role. Several scholars, including Michael Dummett, started to dig into Frege’s background. Positions varied; some studied Frege’s background in order to show that there is nothing that could help us understand his philosophical insights; others found the origins of his philosophical and logical ideas precisely in his background and philosophical environment, in such philosophers as Leibniz, Kant, Trendelenburg, and Lotze.After a few somewhat more quiet years, Frege scholarship expanded after 2000. A number of books have appeared that discuss Frege in the analytic context and also seek [End Page 507] to find more details about his philosophical sources. Wolfgang Künne’s work is a most welcome contribution to contemporary scholarship in the field. Lothar Kreiser’s Gottlob Frege: Leben—Werk—Zeit (2001) has already been available, and interpretations of Frege’s philosophy as well as editions and translations of his books contain short biographies. Still, because of its special composition, Künne’s work serves to fill a gap in the scholarship and significantly contributes to what is known about Frege’s logic and philosophy.The volume consists of three parts. First, there is an extensive biography (about 50 pages) of Frege that places Frege’s thought in its historical context and also contextualizes those of his articles that are included in the work. The main projects Frege pursued, most notably the project of logicism, receive proper attention in the first part of the volume. The four texts that are included in the volume are the Preface of the Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I (1893) and the three logical investigations that were published during Frege’s lifetime, namely “Der Gedanke” (1918), “Die Verneinung” (1919), and “Gedankengefüge” (1923), which were originally published in Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus. Künne has also included a posthumously published text, “Logische Allgemeinheit,” in the volume, as that fragment, which was not written before 1923, was intended to be a fourth logical investigation. The five texts written by Frege that are included in the edition discuss topics that we would now call philosophical logic, such as meaning, reference, and truth, although they also study themes that we would include in ontology and the philosophy of mind. The title of the volume is thus sufficiently motivated.Frege’s texts take up about 100 pages of the volume, while the commentary is about 600 pages. The book also contains an appendix on Bolzano and Frege, where Künne pays attention to similarities between the two logicians and philosophers but also shows his skepticism about the thesis that Frege had read Bolzano. Apart from this position, Künne prefers to read Frege’s texts closely and inform his reader of historical and philological matters rather than take part in any heated debates concerning interpretations; his own positions become visible only indirectly, through the extensive footnotes. The work also contains a very useful bibliography and indexes of names and subjects.The book is extremely rich. If one, for example, wishes to know more about the views of Frege’s German contemporaries, about the standpoints that Russell or Wittgenstein had on Fregean topics, or about the arguments of Frege scholars, one can find... (shrink)

In some ways that have been largely ignored, ethnic-group names might be similar to names of other kinds. If they are, for instance, analogous to proper names, then a correct semantic account of the latter could throw some light on how the meaning of ethnic-group names should be construed. Of course, proper names, together with definite descriptions, belong to the class of singular terms, and an influential view on the semantics of such terms was developed, at the turn of (...) the nineteenth century, from discussion of a puzzle about some differences in the cognitive value of certain statements of identity. Clearly, that a = a (e.g., that Mark Twain was Mark Twain) is trivial, and its truth could be known a priori, just by thinking. On the other hand, that a = b (e.g., that Mark Twain was Samuel Clemens) is of course informative and knowable only by empirical investigation. To solve this puzzle, Frege famously proposed that those variations in the cognitive value of statements of identity “can arise only if the difference between the signs corresponds to a difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated.” On his view, although in the above statements of identity, the singular terms, ‘a,’ and, ‘b,’ may designate the same thing, they do so with different senses, or under different modes of presentation of that object. When the puzzling statements involving ‘a’ and ‘b’ are true, they may then be said to have exactly the same reference. But since those singular terms pick out the object of reference differently (i.e., under different senses or modes of presentation), therefore the cognitive value of these statements also varies significantly. On this account, then, the reference of a non-vacuous proper name is secured by the name’s sense, or mode of presentation, which constitutes its semantic content. And given that Fregeans (here under the influence of Russell) cash out that sense as consisting in whatever concept (or cluster of concepts) could be uniquely associated with that name, they might hold, for example, that the property of being the author of Huckleberry Finn, and that of being an American who lived his early life in Hannibal, Missouri, and later became a famous writer, amount to the senses of ‘Mark Twain,’ and ‘Samuel Clemens,’ respectively.. (shrink)

Saul Kripke's puzzle about belief demonstrates the lack of soundness of the traditional argument for the Fregean fundamental principle that the sentences 'S believes that a is F' and 'S believes that b is F' can differ in truth value even if a = b. This principle is a crucial premise in the traditional Fregean argument for the existence of semantically relevant senses, individuative elements of beliefs that are sensitive to our varying conceptions of what the beliefs are about. Joseph (...) Owens has offered a new argument for this fundamental principle, one that is not subject to Kripke's criticisms. I argue that even though Owens' argument avoids Kripke's criticisms, it has other flaws. (shrink)

I argue that a certain initially appealing Fregean conception of our shared semantic competence in our shared language cannot be made good. In particular, I show that we must reject two fundamental Fregean principles‐what I call Frege's Adequacy Condition and what I call Frege's Cognitive Constraint on Reference Determination. Frege's adequacy condition says that in an adequate semantic theory, sentence meanings must have the same fineness of grain as attitude contents. The Cognitive Constraint on Reference Determination (...) says that in an adequate semantic theory mechanisms of reference determination will fix routes of epistemic access to referents and will mediate one‐sided recognition judgments about referents. I argue against Frege's adequacy condition that if meanings are sliced as finely as it requires there will be too many meanings to go around. I argue against the cognitive constraint on reference determination that even in an adequate theory of reference, mechanisms of reference determination must be sharply distinguished from routes of epistemic access. If so, we have little reason to expect an adequate theory of reference determination to directly illuminate Frege's cognitive puzzles or be sufficient to explain the basis of our one‐sided recognition judgments. (shrink)

One of the most important objections to information-based semantic theories is that they are incapable of explaining Frege cases. The worry is that if a concept’s intentional content is a function of its informational content, as such theories propose, then it would appear that coreferring expressions have to be synonymous, and if this is true, it’s difficult to see how an agent could believe that a is F without believing that b is F whenever a and b are identical. (...) I argue that this appearance is deceptive. If we heed the distinction between the analog and digital contents of a signal, it is actually possible to reconstruct something akin to Frege’s sense/reference distinction in purely information-theoretic terms. This allows informational semanticists to treat coreferring expressions as semantically distinct and to solve Frege cases in the same way that Frege did—namely, by appealing to the different contents of coreferring expressions. (shrink)

Communication and content presents a comprehensive and foundational account of meaning based on new versions of situation theory and game theory. The literal and implied meanings of an utterance are derived from first principles assuming little more than the partial rationality of interacting agents. New analyses of a number of diverse phenomena – a wide notion of ambiguity and content encompassing phonetics, syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and beyond, vagueness, convention and conventional meaning, indeterminacy, universality, the role of truth in communication, (...) class='Hi'>semantic change, translation, Frege’s puzzle of informative identities – are developed. Communication, speaker meaning, and reference are defined. Frege’s context and compositional principles are generalized and reconciled in a fixed-point principle, and a detailed critique of Grice, several aspects of Lewis, and some aspects of the Romantic conception of meaning are offered. Connections with other branches of linguistics, especially psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, historical linguistics, and natural language processing, are explored. -/- The book will be of interest to scholars in philosophy, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and cognitive science. It should also interest readers in related fields like literary and cultural theory and the social sciences. (shrink)

This paper brings to light a new puzzle for Frege interpretation, and offers a solution to that puzzle. The puzzle concerns Frege’s judgement-stroke (‘|’), and consists in a tension between three of Frege’s claims. First, Frege vehemently maintains that psychological considerations should have no place in logic. Second, Frege regards the judgementstroke—and the associated dissociation of assertoric force from content, of the act of judgement from the subject matter about which judgement is made—as a crucial part of (...) his logic. Third, Frege holds that judging is an inner mental process, and that the distinction marked by the judgement-stroke, between entertaining a thought and judging that it is true, is a psychological distinction. I argue that what initially looks like confusion here on Frege’s part appears quite reasonable when we remind ourselves of the differences between Frege’s conception of logic and our own. (shrink)

This article explores Gareth Evans’s idea that there are such things as descriptive names, i.e. referring expressions introduced by a definite description which have, unlike ordinary names, a descriptive content. Several ignored semantic and modal aspects of this idea are spelled out, including a hitherto little explored notion of rigidity, super-rigidity. The claim that descriptive names are (rigidified) descriptions, or abbreviations thereof, is rejected. It is then shown that Evans’s theory leads to certain puzzles concerning the referential status of (...) descriptive names and the evaluation of identity statements containing them. A tentative solution to these puzzles is suggested, which centres on the treatment of definite descriptions as referring expressions. (shrink)

John Perry has urged that a semantic theory for natural languages ought to be concerned with the issue of cognitive significance—of how true identity statements containing different (utterances of) indexicals and proper names can be informative, held to be unaccountable by the referentialist view. The informativeness that he has in mind—one that has puzzled Frege, Kaplan and Wettstein—concerns knowledge about the world. In trying to solve this puzzle on referentialist terms, he comes up with the notion of (...) class='Hi'>cognitive significance as a special kind of a second-order content which should account for cognitive significance in the former sense. Focusing on his treatment of perceptual demonstratives, I argue that he fails to do so both on the level of second-order contents containing demonstrative utterances and on the level of second-order contents containing perceptual buffers as new notions associated with the perceptions and used to temporarily store ideas we gain from the perceptions, which he holds to be causally connected to each other. (shrink)

Determinist thought with its sui generis view on life, nature and being as a whole is a point of view that could be observed in many different cultures and beliefs. It was thanks to Greek thought that it ceased to be a cultural element and transformed into a systematic cosmology. Schools such as Leucippos, then Democritos and Stoa attempted to integrate the determinist philosophy into ontology and cosmology. In the course of time, physics and metaphysics-based determinism approaches were introduced, and (...) a wide spectrum has emerged from genetics to behaviorism, from culture to psychology, from atomism to divinity. Determinism, whether physical or metaphysical origin, ignores freedom of will and deny agency competence over human behavior. Due to this feature, it is opposed by ethical theories, legal philosophies and religions. When the arguments for determinism are possible to disprove logically and philosophically, this is not so easy when the claims base themselves on scientific base. As the logical consequence of this novel fact, it is important to question the epistemological value of scientific knowledge and critically analyze the data of experiments and clinical studies in terms of methodology when answering any hypothesis such as neuro-biological, neuro-psychological, or neuro-theological argumentations. On the other hand, it is necessary to reach alternative experiments on the same subject or to show that it is possible to interpret them in different ways, as in the example of the Libet experiment. The neurobiological determinism based on biological reductionism, emerged as the result of ignoring the ontological difference of the mind, equating the mind with the brain, or defining mentality as an epiphenomenon of the brain. The main divergence stems from the acceptance of materialist philosophy. Paradigms that reduce existence only to matter do not take the metaphysical possibilities into account. In this case, although the problems called qualia or subjective experience stand there unresolved, the claim is preserved. Although many new developments such as the discovery of the entropy law, the big bang theory, and quantum physics have shaken the materialist philosophy, modern science resists an epistemological revision. However, with the current epistemology, it does not seem possible to grasp both the universe and the being as a whole. This is the most important reason why every attempt to understand the nature and spiritual side of human beings fails despite numerous experiments on the brain. However, the human brain is an organ that seems sophisticated and its secrets cannot be easily solved. Since there is not enough information about the brain, there is not enough evidence to claim that the brain, and therefore the mind, are part of the deterministic universe. Increasing brain researches since the last quarter of the twentieth century has revealed that genes, neurons and particularly brain chemistry claim much greater role than expected in human behavior. These results have been instrumentalized by some researchers for a radical claim that free will is an illusion, while by others it has led to the acceptance of will as less important over actions than was thought. Both ideas adopted a model of biological determinism in which freedom of will was ignored. Hypotheses based on controversial interpretations of various experiments raised concerns about religious, moral, and legal responsibility. Although man cannot be thought of as a non-free being from the point of view of common sense, the smog screen over the truth would not be lifted unless the scientific data in question had a correct interpretation. At first glance, it seems unreasonable to discuss universal determinism in the quantum universe. Nevertheless, the claim that strong causality prevails in the material world, including consciousness, remains in place. Therefore, firstly criticizing determinism and then examining biological determinism will help to fix the conceptual framework. This article aims to explain why genetics and neurobiology, while acknowledging their importance in the realization of behavior, can’t completely abolish moral agency. Some hypotheses attribute consciousness and free will to the physico-shimic structure of the brain, the random activity of neurons, or the ability to automatically transform inputs into outputs with the advantage of genetic information. This is the most sensitive and important point of being human; it attacks free will. Paradoxically, while global civilization of our time promises infinite freedom to human beings the science of the same age tries to prove that it is not free. (shrink)

Abstract:During the early 19th century, a peculiarly systematic way of organizing books emerged in Germany. This systematization, which purported to be a rational organization of subject matter, was an outgrowth of the philosophy of Hegel. This article attempts to outline Hegel's organizational practice. It argues that Hegel's encyclopedia was a reaction against the Enlightenment encyclopedia, and that it attempted to restore the systematic mindset of pre-modern reference books. Yet it did this, not in a straightforward fashion, but by developing (...) a method for organizing material that both stresses the interconnectedness of knowledge and promises to be highly scalable. In its attempt to trace the Hegelian organizational method, this article revisits and calls attention to a forgotten work in Hegel scholarship by Michael John Petry, who was the first writer to seriously stress the importance of classification in Hegel's work. This article is an attempt to demonstrate that Hegelianism and information organization can be brought into fruitful and mutually beneficial dialogue. (shrink)

Bozickovic’s The Indexical Point of View is a richly informative and solid philosophical work about the problem of cognitive significance involving indexical thoughts and expressions. Although I tend to agree with most of what is said in the book, here I will make some comments on two minor correlated points regarding Bozickovic’s Fregean account of indirect speech reports (or ISRs). After presenting some of the author's ideas about reports, I will claim that the tracking and updating involved in ISRs (...) is of a complex kind that requires attention to the role played by speech reporters and their audiences. Following that, I will hold that a general theory of correct ISR strictly in Fregean terms (as Bozickovic’s) fails to account for that - at least directly. (shrink)

The nature of reference, or the relation of a word to the object to which it refers, has been perhaps the dominant concern of twentieth-century analytic philosophy. Extremely influential arguments by Gottlob Frege around the turn of the century convinced the large majority of philosophers that the meaning of a word must be distinguished from its referent, the former only providing some kind of direction for reaching the latter. In the last twenty years, this Fregean orthodoxy has been vigorously challenged (...) by those who argue that certain important kinds of words, at least, refer directly without need of an intermediate meaning or sense. The essays in this volume record how a long-term study of Frege has persuaded the author that Frege's pivotal distinction between sense and reference, and his attendant philosophical views about language and thought, are unsatisfactory. Frege's perspective, he argues, imposes a distinctive way of thinking about semantics, specifically about the centrality of cognitive significance puzzles for semantics. Freed from Frege's perspective, we will no longer find it natural to think about semantics in this way. (shrink)

Context: Radical constructivism claims that we have no final truth criteria for establishing one ontology over another. This leaves us with the question of how we can come to know anything in a viable manner. According to von Glasersfeld, radical constructivism is a theory of knowledge rather than a philosophy of the world in itself because we do not have access to a human-independent world. He considers knowledge as the ordering of experience to cope with situations in a satisfactory way. (...) Problem: Von Foerster and Krippendorff show that the central goal of a constructivist theory of knowing must be to find a way of putting the knower into a known that is constructed so as to keep the knower, as well as the knowing process, viable in practice. Method: The conceptual and philosophical analysis of present theories and their necessary prerequisites suggests that such foundation for viable knowing can be built on the analysis of what the ontological prerequisites are for establishing viable observing, cognition, communication and observer-communicators, and communication media and vehicles. Results: The moment an observer chooses to accept his/her own embodied conscious presence in this world as well as language, he/she must accept other humans as partly independently existing conversation partners; if knowledge and knowing has to make sense, he/she must also accept as prerequisites for our observation and conversation a pre-linguistic reality from which our bodies come and which our conversation is often about. Furthermore, we can no longer claim that there is a reality that we do not know anything about: From being here in conversation, we know that the world can produce more or less stable embodied consciousnesses that can exchange and construct conceptual meanings through embodied conversations and actions that last over time and exist in space-time and mind, and are correlated to our embodied practices. We can also see that our communication works through signs for all living systems as well as in human language, understood as a structured and progressively developed system of communication. The prerequisite for this social semiotic production of meaning is the fourfold “semiotic star of cybersemiotics,” which includes at least four different worlds: our bodies, the combination of society, culture and language, our consciousness, and also an outer nature. Implications: The semiotic star in cybersemiotics claims that the internal subjective, the intersubjective linguistic, our living bodies, and nature are irreducible and equally necessary as epistemological prerequisites for knowing. The viable reality of any of them cannot be denied without self-refuting paradoxes. There is an obvious connectedness between the four worlds, which Peirce called “synechism.” It also points to Peirce’s conclusion that logic and rationality are part of the process of semiosis, and that meaning in the form of semiosis is a fundamental aspect of reality, not just a construction in our heads. Erratum: The paper erroneously refers to “pleroma.” The correct term is “plemora.” . (shrink)

In this article I offer an explicating interpretation of the procedure of content recarving as described by Frege in §64 of the Foundations of Arithmetic. I argue that the procedure of content recarving may be interpreted as an operation that while restricting the subject matter of a sentence, performs a generalization on what the sentence says about its subject matter. The characterization of the recarving operation is given in the setting of Yablo’s theory of subject matter and (...) it is based on the relation of determination between properties. The main advantage of the proposal is its generality, for it is applicable not just to the case of abstraction principles. (shrink)

Frege's Puzzle is a founding problem in analytic philosophy. It lies at the intersection of central topics in the philosophy of language and mind: the theory of reference, the nature of propositional attitudes, the nature of semantic theorizing, the relation between semantics and pragmatics, etc. This chapter is an overview of the puzzle and of the space of contemporary approaches to it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Consciousness and Machines:A Commentary Drawing on Japanese PhilosophyS. D. Noam Cook (bio)Viewed from within the great unity of consciousness, thinking is a wave on the surface of a great intuition.Kitarō NishidaIntroductionRecent developments in AI have made the long-standing debate about what computers can and can't do a major public concern. What we understand the properties of such machines to be, and consequently how we design [End Page 305] and (...) deploy them, will increasingly shape how we live and how we understand ourselves. Thus, there is an urgent need for better understanding of these issues.Susan Schneider, in her book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind, offers an exceptionally careful and insightful examination of key issues entailed in how we understand AI and ourselves. One of her central concerns is how we might test for machine consciousness. Given the variations in design and function among current and projected AIs, Schneider sees no likely one-size-fits-all test. So, she offers a battery of different tests that she believes together will make such testing more reliable. This seems a wise approach, and reflects the conceptual and pragmatic care Schneider takes throughout the book.Similarly, it seems to me that the question of machine consciousness should also include various understandings of consciousness itself. What consciousness is taken to be has varied widely both historically and culturally. No commonly accepted single understanding has emerged, and may never emerge. Just as having a battery of tests might help us better assess possible machine consciousness, having different understandings of consciousness might give us a better understanding of what we are testing for. The two should work in tandem, each gauging and shaping the other.Like the development of computers themselves, the predominant thinking about AI has been shaped, in part, by key presuppositions of a scientific worldview, with its origins in Western thought and culture. Among these presuppositions are materialism, reductionism, and a primary focus on objective behavior. These are reflected in the common concern with observable behavior of physical aspects of the brain in efforts to understand human consciousness, which in turn has become a familiar model for work on machine consciousness. All this is important and valuable work. But, in the spirit of Schneider's cautions, it should not be taken as one-size-fits-all. Accordingly, I offer one view of consciousness from a different perspective.In what follows, I sketch out an understanding of consciousness that draws on Japanese philosophy, particularly that of the highly influential early twentieth-century Japanese philosopher Kitarō Nishida (1870–1945). I then explore how the tests for machine consciousness that Schneider proposes might be viewed from that perspective.Consciousness: A Perspective from Japanese PhilosophyConsciousness was a central concern for Nishida, whose philosophy is deeply informed by Japanese culture and by Zen theory and practice. As one might expect from such a philosopher, Nishida's exploration of consciousness is not concerned with properties of the brain, but with what we might discern through disciplined reflection on the experience of our own consciousness. Ultimately, he views consciousness as an organic whole [End Page 306] of systemically organized interrelationships of activities and sensations within our subjective experience. This may be understood by first considering 'nothingness'.For Nishida, nothingness does not suggest an ultimate and absolute vacuity, as is often understandably assumed. In Nishida's sense, it is a singular "place" that mirrors the multifaceted world of our common experience. In understanding this, I am told by native Japanese speakers that the English word 'nothingness' has an advantage over the Japanese equivalent, 'mu', in that 'nothingness' can usefully be broken down as 'nothing-ness'. This suggests that nothingness is a state of consciousness where what we commonly experience as distinct (self, other, world, blue, ache, joy, etc.) is indistinct, a state of unified experience. This is consciousness without our finding or discriminating in it the myriad "things" of common experience, but rather a "pure experience" of a singular whole. Nishida introduces his concept of "pure experience" as follows:To experience means to know facts just as they are, to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one... (shrink)

In this article I offer an explicating interpretation of the procedure of content recarving as described by Frege in §64 of the Foundations of Arithmetic. I argue that the procedure of content recarving may be interpreted as an operation that while restricting the subject matter of a sentence, performs a generalization on what the sentence says about its subject matter. The characterization of the recarving operation is given in the setting of Yablo’s theory of subject matter and (...) it is based on the relation of determination between properties. The main advantage of the proposal is its generality, for it is applicable not just to the case of abstraction principles. (shrink)

Although Kripke’s œuvre has had a major impact on analytic philosophy and nearly every aspect of his studies has been thoroughly examined, this does not hold for his schmidentity argument, which, so far, has been widely neglected. To the extent to which it has been treated at all, it has been for the most part radically misunderstood. I hold that this argument, in its correctly reconstructed form, has general relevance for a treatment of Frege’s Puzzle and points towards a (...) fundamental methodological restriction for philosophy of language and especially for semantics, as far as informativity and the general topic of cognitive significance are concerned. To show this, I will briefly set out the context of the schmidentity argument and, in Sects. 2 and 4, sketch a reconstruction thereof, including some criticisms of the argument, and an excursion about Kit Fine’s semantic relationism, which stands in stark contrast to this paper’s central claim. Moreover, I will draw a genuinely new and probably quite unexpected conclusion from all the above, to finally give a glimpse at a bigger picture of where this conclusion should lead our thinking about a theoretical treatment of informativity and a linguistic expression’s cognitive value. (shrink)