The paper discusses the emergence of Frege's puzzle and the introduction of the celebrated distinction between sense and reference in the context of Frege's logicist project. The main aim of the paper is to show that not logicism per se is mainly responsible for this introduction, but Frege's constant struggle against formalism. Thus, the paper enlarges the historical context, and provides a reconstruction of Frege's philosophical development from this broader perspective.

This paper explores the limitations of current empirical approaches to the philosophy of language in light of a recent criticism of Frege's context principle. According to this criticism, the context principle is in conflict with certain features of natural language use and this is held to undermine its application in Foundations of Arithmetic. I argue that this view is mistaken because the features with which the context principle is alleged to be in conflict are irrelevant to the principle's methodological significance (...) for our understanding of the role of analysis in analytic philosophy. (shrink)

Some naturalistic conceptions of philosophical methodologies interpret the doctrine that philosophy is continuous with science to mean that philosophical investigations must implement empirical methods and must not depart from the experimental results that the scientific application of those methods reveal. In this paper, I argue that while our answers to philosophical questions are certainly constrained by empirical considerations, this does not imply that the methods by which these questions are correctly settled are wholly captured by empirical methods. Many historical cases (...) of successful answers to philosophical questions involve strategies and methods that allow the divergence from empirically established results. I develop this idea and then illustrate it with Frege's methodology in his Foundations of Arithmetic. (shrink)