Abstract

Frege's notion of sense contained many strands; one of them is developed here. Frege's picture of a realm of senses which are grasped by those who think and speak is rejected. In its place it is proposed that propositions and senses can serve to describe people's mental states and linguistic behaviour respectively. Two relations of sameness of sense for words and sentences in public languages are defined, and senses are identified as similarity cycles defined under these relations. Using an argument of Kripke's, it is shown that if these senses are used to describe people's mental states--that is, if they are employed as propositions--they will fail to individuate them as we intuitively do. However, it is suggested that this will be true of any system of propositions we choose to employ. Moreover, senses still have useful application in describing linguistic behavior. Two such applications are developed. The first is in an account of belief and speech ascriptions. Senses are employed in an account of belief ascriptions which has the distinctive feature of being 'gappy': reflecting ordinary usage, the account fails to give truth values to ascriptions that result from Paderewski style cases. Speech ascriptions are handled differently: they are shown not to need the gappy treatment. The second application for senses is in an account of anaphora. It is argued that pronouns anaphoric on singular terms inherit the sense and reference of their antecedents. This account is favourably compared with the bound variable account advocated by Reinhart and Sag, and the predicate converter account advocated by Soames. Two final chapters pursue related themes. In the first a combined theory of E-type pronouns is proposed involving elements both from Evans' original account and the account given by Neale. In the second the interpretation of quantification into belief contexts is discussed. It is argued that consideration of iterated attitudes precludes interpreting this as indicating knowledge which. An alternative interpretation is suggested