Frege's Puzzle

Okay, so philosophy of language was a mess and a half in the 20th century. (We could probably say it is still a mess and a half - even two messes). I don't want to blame it on any one guy, but I think there was a point in time when we all got sidetracked and lost in this use/mention debacle*. We might have found our way again, but I'm not that far into the history of the 20th century to know for sure. I'll get back to you. So far I think we haven't.
* (Don't get me wrong - use/mention is super-important to differentiate! Cartwright would have wanted me to uphold the Great Standards of Ye Olde Analytic Philosophie, and well I will; he's right. It's just that it complicates phil'o'lang a whole lot. Fortunately, what we will be discussing today is wholly related to use/mention, and though it might confuse us (or me) more, it will be good for everybody in the long run).

For more on this problem, Wikipedia is a godsend. (Don't judge me - it's good because it's brief).


So. Reference!!! Frege seems driven to make this distinction between sense (the *way* a term refers to something) and reference (the particular object referred to or denoted).
This is because it annoys the crap outta him when we get sentences like:
(1) a = a   and
(2) a = b.
Because, if the only things names have are references (this is what is often called the Direct Reference View), it seems like a = a is saying exactly the same thing as a = b -- namely, you're substituting in an object (say the reference of both "a" and "b" is my cat Luna) and then making the statement. "Luna is Luna" would be what is meant by *both* expressions. But wait, *that* doesn't seem right; it's not even particularly informative.
What if we take each statement to be saying something about the name itself? Then, though (1) would be okay (the name a is the name a), (2) would be clearly false (the name a is the name b? What?).

Frege's solution is to posit these things called senses - which, if you're giving a rather inaccurate and anachronistic gloss, are sort of like mental content. Senses on his own account are essentially everything that's left in meaning when you remove the reference part of meaning. So, the sense of dog is whatever is left of its meaning when you remove its object, namely the/an actual dog. (Did that make it more confusing? Then just think of it as something like mental content, except make it as objective, intersubjective, and not merely subjective as possible - like language. The important bit here is that its 'objective' properties are primary; it is intersubjective in the sense that this objective stuff is accessible to more than one person).
Sometimes people gloss a sense as a mode of presentation of an object, but it would be more right to say that *often* senses are *tied to* particular modes of presentation, rather than saying that senses merely are these modes of presentation.

So, getting back to sentence (2), Frege would say that each term has a different sense, but the same reference; and when you put the equals sign in between them, you're saying something interesting about each independent term (namely that, despite having different senses, which might have led you to believe they referred to different objects, they in fact have the same reference).

It sounds really neat 'n' all, right? Well, it gets messy. (Doesn't everything in philosophy get messy?)

Because, well, what if you want to talk about expressions without references, i.e., empty expressions? Like, what if I want to talk about Shakespeare's Hamlet?
Then sentences like, "Ophelia drowned herself in the river," become a little controversial to gloss, given Frege's view.
There are two options for interpretation that cut across interpretive lines:
A) Ophelia has no reference, just a sense, which is what gives the sentence its meaning. The sense can be described as something other than a mode of presentation.
B) The sentence only looks meaningful; it's really not. There is no mode of presentation because there's no object. Maybe it has a 'pretend meaning', if we 'play along' with the statement, and, e.g., pretend that Ophelia denotes a person.

These different ways of glossing Frege depend on what you take Frege's account of the sense of empty proper names to be. If you take sense to be a mode of presentation, you get result B, in which there just isn't any way in which the object is being presented (since there isn't any object), though perhaps if you pretend that there is then you can still evaluate the sentence within the pretend-world.

If you take sense instead to be something like a definite description, you can get A - so if you gloss "Ophelia" as "Hamlet's object of romantic interest in Shakespeare's Hamlet", or the like, then the sentence has meaning. The problem on this account is, however, the same that comes up with any theory of definite description - for the best objections to descriptivism, we'd have to bring in Kripke. Ultimately it comes down to... well... what it comes down to.
If any name can be replaced with a description, where do names in descriptions get their meaning? And furthermore, even if you give basic concepts (er, meanings) from which all others can be derived, you still have the annoying problem of figuring out exactly WHICH definite description to use for things. Like, how do you come up with the optimal definite description such that you pick out one and only one thing that you want to talk about???
Maybe the requirements for descriptivism aren't *quite* so stringent, but the fact is that one must interpret Frege as either a descriptivist or a non-descriptivist, and I'm not sure what the most charitable interpretation actually *is*. Kripke himself lumps him together with Russell, the prime descriptivist; but many have protested that that's not at all what Frege intended.

Nonetheless, if Frege's a non-descriptivist, we get trapped with B, namely having to 'pretend' that meaningful sentences have meaning. It might not be that terrible; but it'd be a big blow to Frege. It really doesn't seem to be what he intended, either. He might have just been happier saying that the sentence *had* no truth value.
Russellians and logical positivists will have problems with *that*, but that's a topic for another day...

Point is, am I really happy with Frege's views through the mouths of other people? No.
Am I happy with Frege's views through his own mouth? ........well. No. It seems one way to save him is by allowing "sense" to just be this "mental content" stuff; but that's the last thing he wanted. He was like the #1 enemy of psychologism. So maybe we need to bite the bullet and count our losses...