This dissertation is about the structure of thought. Following Gottlob Frege, I define a thought as the sort of content relevant to determining whether an assertion is true or false. The historical component of the dissertation involves interpreting Frege’s actual views on the structure of thought. I argue that Frege did not think that a thought has a unique decomposition into its component senses, but rather the same thought can be decomposed into senses in a variety of distinct ways. I (...) extend Frege’s position and use it to develop an account of the hierarchy of senses, the senses expressed by indexicals and demonstratives, and the distinction between logical and non-logical structure. I also discuss various connections with the nature of meta-representation, our capacity for reflective judgment, some aspects of the structure of conscious experience, the way we perceive regions of space and durations of time, and our conscious awareness of our own perceptions and events of thinking. (shrink)

Are Fregean thoughts compositionally complex and composed of senses? We argue that, in Begriffsschrift, Frege took 'conceptual contents' to be unstructured, but that he quickly moved away from this position, holding just two years later that conceptual contents divide of themselves into 'function' and 'argument'. This second position is shown to be unstable, however, by Frege's famous substitution puzzle. For Frege, the crucial question the puzzle raises is why "The Morning Star is a planet" and "The Evening Star is a (...) planet" have different contents, but his second position predicts that they should have the same content. Frege's response to this antinomy is of course to distinguish sense from reference, but what has not previously been noticed is that this response also requires thoughts to be compositionally complex, composed of senses. That, however, raises the question just how thoughts are composed from senses. We reconstruct a Fregean answer, one that turns on an insistence that this question must be understood as semantic rather than metaphysical. It is not a question about the intrinsic nature of residents of the third realm but a question about how thoughts are expressed by sentences. (shrink)

Does the epistemology of disagreement have significant consequences for theories of conceptual understanding? I argue that it does. I argue that the epistemology of disagreement manifests the existence of a special kind of concept, perspectival modes of metarepresentation, a kind of concept instances of which figure in the thinking about thoughts that occurs in deep disagreement. These perspectival modes of metarepresentation are de re modes of presentation of thoughts themselves – hence de re modes of metarepresentation – in which one (...) and the same thought is presented to higher‐order thinking about thoughts in different ways. These modes or ways are de re and perspectival because they are individuated by facts about whether the thought being thought about is the grasped or understood propositional object of one's own or another's thinking. I outline a broadly Fregean framework for theorizing conceptual understanding and draw out three significant consequences of the existence of perspectival modes of metarepresentation for theories of conceptual understanding: they (1) constitute a new philosophical motivation for a restricted fragment of what Terence Parsons calls a “libertine” hierarchy of Fregean sense; (2) provide, against David Chalmers, examples of a priori equivalences that are nevertheless cognitively significant; and (3) constitute a novel and pervasive example of Kripkean ‘Paderewski’‐type designators. (shrink)

Frege appears to hold both that thoughts are internally articulated, in a way that mirrors the semantic articulation of the sentences that express them, and that the same thought can be analyzed in different ways, none of which has to be more fundamental than the others. Commentators have often taken these theses to be mutually incompatible and have tended to polarize into two camps, each of which attributes to Frege one of the theses, but maintains that he is only apparently (...) committed to the other. This paper argues that there are good exegetical and philosophical reasons for reconciling the two theses; that this reconciliation can be achieved by rejecting an assumption shared by the two opposite camps of the exegetical debate, i.e., the assumption that essential articulatedness implies unique articulation; and finally, that this crucial assumption can be resisted by appreciating Frege’s anti-atomistic and ‘organic’ conception of the internal complexity of thoughts. (shrink)

The paper examines Davidson′s discussion of Frege on the problem of predication. Simple declarative sentences are unities that are true or false; how do predicates contribute to this kind of semantic unity? According to Davidson, the problem cannot be solved by assigning referents to predicates, since this leads to an infinite regress. Frege famously contributes the idea that predicates are “incomplete” or “unsaturated” functional expressions, mapping objects to truth-values. However, he takes predicates to refer to concepts and thus is exposed (...) to Davidson′s argument. I will show that Davidson is only right with regards to “Frege′s semantics”. Yet Frege′s logical doctrine of the decomposition of a sentence – I shall argue – allows for a resolution of this problem. (shrink)