Sinning Against Frege (1979)

Frege's claims about indexicals, and to a lesser extent proper names, makes it clear that his notion of sense is different from what is now ordinarily understood as linguistic meaning; both communal and idiolectic linguistic meaning. This difference derives from his interest in language as an expression of thought, not in the rules governing linguistic usage and linguistic understanding. A large number of authors and translators are criticized for assimilating Frege's notion of sense to linguistic meaning. Frege's views on names are shown to be capable of resisting some, but not all, of the criticisms leveled against them by Kripke and others. This chapter maintains that the right way to criticize Frege on proper names and indexicals is to criticize his theory of thought, not his understanding of natural language. The weakness in his theory of thought is that he takes all thought components to be eternal and independent of any occurrences in space and time for being the thought components that they are. Elements in thought that are occurrence-based are needed to account for certain de re propositional attitudes.