Abstract

Fregean accounts of indirect sense hold that “Kripke” expresses its ordinary sense in “Kripke was a remarkable philosopher”, but its indirect sense in propositional attitude reports such as “Only fools deny that Kripke was a remarkable philosopher”. The idea that there are indirect senses, distinct from ordinary ones, has struck many as troublesome. Indeed, following Donald Davidson, the possibility of generating infinitely many indirect senses for each expression with an ordinary sense has motivated skepticism even further. In response, Kripke has offered an influential “acquaintance model” of indirect senses. The first aim of this paper is to argue that Kripke’s argument for his model fails: it relies on an unavailable “backward road” from reference to sense. The second aim is to vouchsafe Kripke’s model differently. I provide a job description for indirect senses, and argue that any account which fits this description will end up looking very similar to Kripke’s.