Departing from Frege: Essays in the Philosophy of Language (review)

Perhaps most philosophers of language tracing the Anglo-Saxon analytic tradition would begin with Gottlob Frege’s views about identity statements and empty names. Mark Sainsbury in this book is no exception, as the title indicates. However, he goes so far from the assumed origin that the twelve selected essays, previously published over a twenty-year span, put together contribute to the ontogeny of a new semantic theory of singular terms. Besides the reprinted essays, S adds an introduction that presents the central theme of paring down Fregeanism and comments on each essay.

In the introduction, S claims that two crucial elements in Frege’s writing should be retained: the distinction between sense and reference, and Frege’s allowance for sense without a referent. He takes both as a starting point in the following essays to develop his argument for the rejection of descriptivist accounts of singular terms. The first essay, ‘Understanding and theories of meaning’, is an argument in response to Donald Davidson’s truth interpretation theory. It is argued that a ‘means-that’ theory is as good as a truth theory in constructing a philosophy of meaning. The second essay is intended to serve as an introduction to Gareth Evans’s The varieties of reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982). The third essay, ‘Concepts without boundaries’, provides a fuzzy-logic-based alternative to Frege’s claim that concepts draw sharp boundaries. Essay 4, ‘Russell on names and communication’, is addressed to Saul Kripke’s attribution of the description theory of names to Bertrand Russell. The fifth essay, ‘How can something say something’, continues the author’s rereading of Russell with the focus on Russell’s multiple relation theory of judgment. Essay 6 explores whether the reliability conditional is consistent with the knowledge claim in Timothy Williamson’s epistemic theory of vagueness.

Essay 7 argues that the Fregean conception of sense should be treated as sameness of sense. This notion secures the convergence of meanings that relates to the same proper name. The author argues that notions such as logical truth, logical form, and logical validity cannot make sense without presupposing Fregean sense. In Essay 8, the author’s treatment of the systematic transformation of indexicals in reported speech raises many interesting issues relative to formal semantic theories. In cases of nondetachability, no exchange of coreferring expressions can occur without affecting the truth value of what was said. This suggests a criterion to distinguish anaphoric terms from indexicals. It is argued that all indexicals can be properly reported by nonindexicals in the sense of splitting the reported speech into the scene-setting part and content-ascribing part. Essay 9, ‘Names, fictional names and “really” ’, poses the puzzle that the apparent lack of bearers for false names makes these names no less unintelligible in communication. By challenging the solutions from Evans and David Wiggins, S convincingly argues that there can be a sense without a referent. Essay 10 favors the abandonment of senses as entities. Essay 11, ‘Two ways to smoke a cigarette’, deals with the inconsistency between the Fregean principle of compositionality, which assumes that the meaning of a complex expression should be a function of the meaning of its parts, and his claim that the understanding of a word is possible only in the context of a proposition. The last essay seeks to justify a semantics of natural language based on the view that expressions could have sense yet lack reference.

Reading these essays, one is ever mindful of the consistency of the author’s arguments spanning a time period of more than twenty years. Most of the analyses are still relevant and are likely to stimulate further research on singular terms and reference in the future.