Abstract

The orthodox view of content and reference used to be the one originated by Frege and developed by Russell and Searle: The content of a name, kind term, indexical, or demonstrative is not its referent but a mode of presentation: an abstract entity that picks out a referent. Most successors of Frege believed that these contents were determined, in some way, by the beliefs people associated with the terms. ;This view was challenged by the New Theoretic Revolution, an extremely influential cluster of ideas that surfaced in the 1970s. The New Theoretic Revolution had two main theses, the baptismal picture of naming and the theory of direct reference. According to the baptismal picture of naming, which was most famously presented by Kripke and Putnam, there need be no mode of presentation determined by beliefs people associate with names and kind terms that determine their referents. The baptismal picture states that the referent of such a term is simply its baptismal source, the object or kind that the term for which the term was originally introduced. According to the theory of direct reference, which was most famously presented by Kaplan, not only names and natural kind terms but even such terms as indexicals and demonstratives, which clearly are associated with modes of presentation that pick out their referents, do not have these modes of presentation as their contents. The content of these terms, on the direct referentialist account, is their referent. ;We argue that the claims of the New Theoretic Revolution were accepted in haste. The first part of the thesis is devoted to the refutation of the baptismal picture of naming and the introduction and defense of a neo-Fregean, conceptual-role theory of reference fixing. The second part of the thesis examines the theory of direct reference. We do not attempt to refute the theory, but we argue that neo-Fregean theories of content are still viable alternatives. We extend the theory of reference fixing developed in part one to a theory of content