Frege's puzzle is a fundamental challenge for accounts of mental and linguistic representation. This piece surveys a family of recent approaches to the puzzle that posit representational relations. I identify the central commitments of relational approaches and present several arguments for them. I also distinguish two kinds of relationism—semantic relationism and formal relationism—corresponding to two conceptions of representational relations. I briefly discuss the consequences of relational approaches for foundational questions about propositional attitudes, intentional explanation, and compositionality.

‘On Reference’ is a collection of 18 original articles. While united in their concern with reference, they deal with a large variety of topics, ranging from questions concerning the nature of reference, through the interaction of reference and cognition, to more specific questions about the semantics of particular referring expressions. The contributions are of high quality: thought provoking, insightful and engagingly written. Many have the potential to substantially advance the debate in their field. In this critical notice I will do (...) two things. I will focus on a cluster of four essays (Chs. 10-13) that are concerned with a single topic: the view that proper names are predicates. Apart from illustrating the above mentioned virtues, these essays are well suited to be discussed in conjunction due to their tightly connected subject matter. Before I get to this though, I will give brief summaries of the remaining 14 articles, where space constraints prevent me from discussing them in the detail they deserve. (shrink)

I argue that Frege Problems in thought are best modeled using graph-theoretic machinery; and that these problems can arise even when subjects associate all the same qualitative properties to the object they’re thinking of twice. I compare the proposed treatment to similar ideas by Heck, Ninan, Recanati, Kamp and Asher, Fodor, and others.

This paper will critically examine two solutions to Frege’s puzzle: the Millian-Russellian solution proposed by Salmon and Braun, which invokes non-semantic modes of presentation (guises, ways of believing or the like); and Fine’s relationalist solution, which appeals to semantic coordination. Special attention will be devoted to discussing the conception of modes of presentation as mental files and to elucidating the nature of coordination. A third solution to Frege’s puzzle will be explored which, like Salmon’s and Braun’s, adopts the Millian-Russellian semantics (...) but, like Fine’s, involves coordination instead of modes of presentation; however, coordination will not be conceived as a semantic relation but as a cognitive and subjective relation, which provides no contribution to semantic content. This novel Millian-Russellian account involving cognitive coordination will be labelled cognitive relationism. (shrink)

In his book Semantic Relationism, Kit Fine propounds an original and sophisticated semantic theory called ‘semantic relationism’ or ‘relational semantics’, whose peculiarity is the enrichment of Kaplan’s, Salmon’s and Soames’ Russellian semantics (more specifically, the semantic content of simple sentences and the truth-conditions of belief reports) with coordination, “the very strongest relation of synonymy or being semantically the same”. In this paper, my goal is to shed light on an undesirable result of semantic relationism: a report like “Tom believes that (...) Cicero is bald and Tom does not believe that Tully is bald” is correct according to Fine’s provided truth-conditions of belief reports, but its semantic content is (very likely) a contradiction. As I will argue in the paper, even the resort to the notion of token proposition, introduced in Fine’s recent article “Comments on Scott Soames’ ‘Coordination Problems’”, does not suffice to convincingly eliminate the contradiction; moreover, it raises new difficulties. (shrink)

Kit Fine has argued that the Tarski Semantics for the language of first order logic is inadequate. A semantic theory for FOL is inadequate if there are formulae of FOL whose meanings or satisfaction conditions it cannot compositionally account for. It is argued here that Fine’s case against Tarski rests on a mistake.

I am grateful to Nathan Salmon [in Salmon (2012)] for being willing to spill so much ink over my monograph on semantic relationism (2007), even if what he has to say is not altogether complimentary. There is a great deal in his criticisms to which I take exception but I wish to focus on one point, what he calls my ‘formal disproof’ of standard Millianism. He believes that ‘the alleged hard result is nearly demonstrably false’ (p. 420) and that the (...) disproof contains a ‘serious error’ (p. 407). Neither claim is correct; and it is the aim of this short note to explain why.First some background. In some cases, we are justified (from an internalist standpoint) in inferring the singular proposition F&G(x) from F(x) and G(x) (as when I learn more and more about Obama, for example); and in other cases, we are not so justified (as when Peter, in Kripke’s puzzle case, knows that Paderewski is a pianist and that Paderewski is a politician but does not know that anyone is both a pianist and a poli. (shrink)

This manuscript focuses on a problem for Millian Russellianism raised by Fine : “[Assuming] that we are in possession of the information that a Fs and the information that a Gs, it appears that we are sometimes justified in putting this information ‘together’ and inferring that a both Fs and Gs. But how?” It will be my goal to determine a Millian-Russellian solution to this problem. I will first examine Nathan Salmon’s Millian-Russellian solution, which appeals to a non-semantic and subjective (...) notion of coordination defined in terms of guises. I will object that in order to convincingly solve a specific version of Fine’s problem, identity conditions for guises must be provided. On the other hand, the most plausible way to individuate guises is by means of the equivalence classes of coordination itself. But, if so, the guise-based strategy to solve Fine’s problem risks being circular; in addition, there are serious doubts that coordination is transitive. An alternative Millian-Russellian solution to Fine’s problem will then be explored, which gives up guises and employs, instead, a non-semantic and subjective relation of coordination not defined in terms of guises, along with occurrences of Russellian propositions of a special sort, for which identity conditions will be provided and via which token attitude states intuitively more fine-grained than guises will be individuated. (shrink)