Reorganizing the roles of Fregean Senses after the referentialist turn

 Reorganizing the roles of Fregean Senses after the referentialist turn

Victor Angelucci de Moura Sousa (UFMG)

Frege’s (1982) theory of Sense and Reference is one of the most influential theoretical frameworks in the philosophy of reference, shaping discussion on the theory of reference to this very day. The theory, briefly, consists in the introduction of a two leveled semantic theory, where both Sense and Reference play significant roles. Focusing on Sense, here we highlight three roles played by the technical notion: a semantic role, a meta-semantic role and a cognitive role. In the first place, senses, entities that are attributed to linguistic items, “contain” descriptive modes of presentation. These are the item's contribution to the proposition (the Thought) expressed by the sentence in question; Frege’s theory of propositions is more fine grained then Kaplan’s (1989) singular propositions. This is the semantic role of senses.

Senses also are tasked at fixing the reference of the linguistic item, through a process of satisfaction (following Bach’s (1987) distinction). The description contributed to the Thought expressed by the sentence can be satisfied by objects in the world. When this happens, such object becomes the item’s reference; this is the meta-semantic role. At last, senses also explain how different correfering expressions can differ in cognitive value, how a rational subject can believe that a is F, while disbelieving that b is F, even when a=b. The problem here, known as Frege’s Puzzle or the problem of coreference (Perry, 2001), receives a semantic solution - that is why Frege is widely held to be an author that accepts a Psychological Constraint on Semantics (Wettstein, 1986; Perry, 2001; Almog, 2005).

The theory briefly sketched above, a canonical descriptive reading of Frege’s “On Sense and Reference”, was heavily criticized by authors from the referentialist tradition (Kripke, 1980; Donnellan, 1966; Kaplan, 1989). The resulting picture is as follows: Thoughts were replaced by singular or russellian propositions; the satisfaction-based model of reference fixing was replaced by externalized causal chains that are supposed to lead up to the reference. And, at least initially, the Psychological Constraint disappeared from semantics (Wettstein, 1986). Frege’s Puzzle goes back to unsolved status.

This presentation aims at reorganizing the different roles played by senses, but now within the referentialist tradition. We might see how a current trend in solutions to the puzzle, the Mental File theory (Recanati, 2012), emerged from this dialectic. Our starting point is to look out for a possible place for descriptive information in the new theory of reference, especially with the new externalized meta-semantic mechanisms. In Kaplan’s (1968) work, we can see the connection. His vivid names are mental representations which have both a genetic origin (reference) and group up descriptive information taken to be satisfied by the reference. But satisfaction (or fit) is not the model: a vivid name might be of an object even when all the descriptive information associated with it is not satisfied by the reference. What matters is the fact that the object is the causal origin of this representation (Kaplan, 2013). Besides, there exists the possibility of two different vivid names that have the exact same descriptive content associated with each one, but differ in reference.

There are other similar ideas in the vicinity, such as Evans’ (1973, 1982) use of bundles of information and, finally, Perry’s (1980) version of a mental file view. These representations can clearly play cognitive roles, aiming at a solution to the Puzzle. In the end, we should see how descriptions, Frege’s championed semantical and meta-semantical device, can be re-utilized as descriptive information bundled by mental representations, even amidst the externalization of meta-semantics.