According to Frege, expressions shift their reference when they occur in indirect contexts: in “Anna believes that Plato is wise” the expression “Plato” no longer refers to Plato but to what is ordinarily its sense. Many philosophers, including Carnap, Davidson, Burge, Parsons, Kripke and Künne, believe that on Frege's view the iteration of indirect context creating operators gives rise to an infinite hierarchy of senses. While the former two take this to be problematic, the latter four welcome the hierarchy with (...) open arms. In this paper I argue that the hierarchy should be avoided and that it can be avoided. (shrink)

Mates’s Puzzle has flown below many philosophers’ radar, despite its relations to both Frege’s Puzzle and the Paradox of Analysis. We explain the relations amongst these puzzles on the way to arguing that Mates’s Puzzle suggests a generalization of Frege’s Puzzle, and of the sense-reference distinction itself, in the form of hierarchy of senses. We explain how Mates’s Puzzle and the hierarchy, to different degrees, illuminate each other, and how their connection is missed in the literature. However, we argue that (...) the potential of Mates’s Puzzle to illuminate the hierarchy is yet to be fully actualised. We suggest that in order to do better, we need to formulate Mates’s Puzzle as a puzzle in the philosophy of thought and not as puzzle in the philosophy of language. What is needed, to which the present paper is a precursor, is an account of the cognitive significance of higher-order senses. (shrink)

It is well known that Frege was an extensionalist, in the following sense: he held that the truth-value of a sentence is always a function only of the references of its parts. One consequence of this view is that expressions occurring in certain linguistic contexts – for example, the that-clauses of propositional attitude ascriptions – do not have their usual references, but refer instead to what are usually their senses. But although a number of philosophers have objected to this result, (...) no one has yet attempted to see what happens to Frege's views – and, in particular, to his theory of sense and reference – if his extensionalism is abandoned while his other views are maintained. This paper thus does two things. First, it clears the way for such an attempt, by arguing that recent defences of Frege's extensionalism – by Tyler Burge, Saul Kripke, Terence Parsons and Christopher Peacocke – fall short. Second, it sketches a positive proposal for a non-extensionalist application of Frege's theory of sense and reference to sentences of indirect discourse and ascriptions of propositional attitude. (shrink)