Abstract

Philosophers of language in the late twentieth century may rightly say of Frege what Dostoevsky reportedly said of Gogol: We have all come out from under his overcoat. The Fregean "overcoat"--the Fregean framework in the philosophy of language--covers not only the devastating critique of psychologism and the famous doctrine of sense and reference, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a stock of standard semantic puzzles. This stock includes the puzzle about informative identity statements, the puzzle about nonreferring singular terms, and the puzzle about "opacity": the failure of the Leibnizian law of intersubstitution in psychological reports and other contexts. Closely related to the standard puzzles are what might be called the Essential Fregean Mysteries: the existence of meanings in a third realm ; the intuitive mental act of "grasping" meanings; the peculiarly "unsaturated" character of the designata of predicates; and truth-values as the designata of sentences. By now, as a result of many attacks by ordinary-language philosophers, by possible-worlds semanticists, by psychosemanticists, and by direct reference theorists, the Fregean framework is being dismantled piece by piece. But the shape of the successor framework is not yet fully apparent.