COGNITIVE SIGNIFICANCE WITHOUT COGNITIVE CONTENT

 

           Howard Wettstein

 

           University of Notre Dame

 

 

 

           Imagine how it must appear to the Martian making his first visit to earth.  Let us suppose that he too is an intel­ligent being whose intelligence has, however, evolved without the mediation of language, but rather, say, through the develop­ment of ESP.  So he is some­thing like the angels who, according to St. Thomas, can see things directly in their essences and communi­cate thought without language.  What is the first thing he notices about earthlings?  That they are forever making mouthy little sounds--clicks, hisses, howls, hoots, explosions, squeaks--some of which sounds name things in the world and are uttered in short sequen­ces which say something about these things and events in the world.

 

           Instead of starting out with such large, vexing subjects as soul, mind, ideas, con­sciousness, why not set forth with language, which no one denies, and see how far it takes us toward the rest.

 

           From "The Delta Factor,"[1] by Walker Percy.

 

           1. INTRODUCTION:  TWO CONCEPTIONS OF SEMANTICS

 

           IN THE BEGINNING, there was Frege who approached the philo­sophical study of language with his gaze firmly fixed upon one of those "large, vexing sub­jects," the "eternal structure of thought."[2]  Michael Dummett attributes the following three theses to Frege. 

          

           ". . .first, that the goal of philoso­phy is the analysis of the structure of thought [that is, the objective and eternally existing contents of thought]; second, that the study of thought is to be sharply distin­guished from the study of the psychological process of thinking; and, finally, that the only proper method for ana­lysing thought consists in the analysis of language."[3] 

 

           A central aim of semantics, for Frege, is thus the eluci­dation of how language expresses thought contents.  'Hesperus = Phos­phorus', maintained Frege, expres­ses a significant piece of informa­tion, a nontrivial thought content.  Our semantic account of names must explain how this is so.  Frege concluded that the contribution of the two names to the thought content must be different. 

           Frege's sense-reference approach not only explains the contribu­tions of names to thought contents, it does so in a way that respects what I will call the "intentionality intuition."  This is the powerful traditional idea that in order to be thinking about something, one must have a cognitive fix on it, that something in one's thought must correctly distinguish the referent from every­thing else in the universe.[4]  'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus', then, not only contribute differently to the thought content, but, holds Frege, what each name contributes is its distinctive mode of presentation, its own cognitive fix on the referent.  That a semantic account of a name must make plain the cognitive perspective on the referent that is associated with the name is another crucial feature of the Fregean perspective, one intimately related to Frege's emphasis on thought. 

           Frege's outlook on the business of semantics thus eliminates semantical accounts like Mill's "pure denotation" view of proper names, recently cham­pioned by many of us.  Millian accounts make the semantics of the two names the same, and so will not be able to explain what Frege took to be the very datum, that sentences like 'Hesperus = Phosphorus' express nontrivial thought contents.  The Millian approach to names, moreover, fails to explain the speaker's cognitive fix on the referent.  Even worse, that approach, at least as it's been recently developed, implies that the speaker need not have much of a cognitive fix, perhaps none at all.  Kripke, to mention one prominent example, takes it to be plain that one can refer by proper name even if one has very little inform­ation about the referent--not nearly enough to in­dividuate it.[5]  So much the worse, from Frege's point of view, for cognitively insensitive Millian accounts.

           One might, though, approach the philosophical study of language in a radical­ly different spirit, that suggested by Walker Percy's remarks.  Let's focus for a moment not upon language vis-a-vis thought, but upon language vis-a-vis the realm of things language is used to talk about, or, even better, vis-a-vis our practices of talking about things. 

           The social practices that constitute natural language are, after all, pretty fascinating in and of themselves.  Articulated speech is indeed distinctively human, the first thing that Percy's Martian notices about us.  And thought is one of Percy's "large, vexing subjects," one that might better be approached a bit later--which is not to say that the two subjects are not, in the end, intimately related.  My semanticist thus fixes his gaze upon language as a social, institutional arrangement, and upon speakers as par­ticipants in a social practice.

           Speaking, it occurs to him, like other kinds of practical mastery, does not presuppose theoretical understanding of the practice.  We are indeed for­tunate--God, so to speak, has been good to us--that articulable insight is not necessary, for it is extremely difficult to attain.  Indeed, speakers, and other practi­tioners, may well find their own practices theoretically impene­trable.  Adequate theoret­ical characterizations of one's practices will typically not be available to introspection.  Nor will competent practitioners typically be able even to select some correct charac­terization from a list of fairly plausible candidates.[6] 

           The semanticist thus sees himself as engaging in an anthropological study of the institutional arrangements that constitute natural language.[7]  His charge, more specifi­cally, is to provide an account of the semantics of our linguistic practices.  Which features of the total com­munication situation do our practices count as determin­ing the referen­ces of proper names?  What, as our practices go, links up a particular name (or utterance) with a particular refer­ent?  This is the sort of question in which he is inter­ested.[8]

           Frege's sense-reference account might be seen as providing an answer to this latter question.  Contemporary anti-Fregeans have argued that Frege's is not a good answer.  It fails to accurately reflect the character of our practices.  Perfectly competent speakers often fail to have available the sort of informa­tion required of them by Frege's account.  They often lack anything like purely qualitative individuating beliefs about the referents of the names that they use.  The beliefs that they do have, moreover, often correctly apply to individuals other than the referents of the relevant names, and so on. 

           Frege, moreover--and this is a point of importance for distinguishing the two conceptions of semantics--does not put forth his sense-reference account as an answer to our anthropo­logical semanticist's question:  "What, according to actual linguistic practice, determines the reference of proper names?"  Frege's picture provides, inter alia, an answer to this question, but this is not his focus at the beginning of "On Sense and Reference."[9]  His primary concern is with explaining the contri­bution of names to thought contents. If we use 'semantics' in the second, and non-Fregean way, we can say that Frege's interest wasn't primarily semantical.

           One with a Fregean conception of semantics, on the other hand, might well wonder about the very relevance to semantics--in his sense--of Millian-style accounts of names.  The thesis that the reference of a name depends upon, as Donnellan and Kripke urge, a historical chain of communication, even if this thesis formulates some yet-to-be-classified kind of truth about our practices with proper names, fails to answer the specifically "semantic" questions about the contribution of names to thought contents, and about the cognitive fix involved in the use of names.  If, as we are some­times told, a theory of meaning is a theory of understanding, then it is far from clear that Mill, or the Donnellan-Kripke approach, tells us anything about meaning. 

           Mill's contemporary sympathizers have indeed often been attacked for the alleged cognitive insensitivity of their view.  Millians have not been conscious of deep differences between their conception of semantics and Frege's, and so they have often been embarrassed by the apparent failure of their semantics to yield illumination of the sort demanded by Frege.  Alterna­tively, they have twisted and turned to show that their semantic appa­ratus can be pressed into cognitive service.[10] 

           The anthropological conception of semantics yields a natural response on behalf of the Millian.  The aim of the anthropo­logical semanticist is not, after all, to solve Frege's problems.  Nor does the anthropological seman­ticist presume that his work will yield such solutions.  It is not at all obvious that elucidating the social reference-determining conditions will explain the cognitive dimen­sion, for example, the informativeness of 'Hesperus = Phosphorus'.  The explanation of the latter might, for example, turn upon, in Putnam's terms, what's in the head of the speaker.  Reference, on the other hand--at least if the Millian is correct--has little to do with the head of the speaker.  The anthropological semanticist, on the other hand, need not assume that his work will be of no help in illumi­nating the cognitive dimension.  He can adopt, as they say, a "wait and see" attitude.

           Philosophic debates in which adversaries argue at cross purposes, as in the present case, are typically fueled by deep, unarticulated differences.  My suggestion has been that contrary to the appearances, we should not think of the two approaches as engaged in a single explanatory project.  Indeed, their explanatory projects, while displaying considerable overlap, differ substantially.  This difference in explanatory project, the difference in conception of the semantic enterprise, does not, however, exhaust the deep, unarticulated differen­ces of which I spoke.  That their semantic projects sharply diverge is itself a symptom of a much deeper divide between Fregeans and anti-Fregeans.  My central aims here are to call attention to differ­ences at the level of broad philosophic outlook, and to draw some implications for the area of intersection of philosophy of language and philosophy of mind in which Frege and his followers have been so interested.            

           The anti-Fregean view, it turns out, is far from cognitively insensitive.  That view, seen in the context of the broad outlook to be proposed here, does provide a most natural way of thinking about the cogni­tive dimension.  Mill's remarks on names, and those of Donnellan and Kripke as well, do indeed fail to provide for the sort of account of the cognitive dimension that Frege sought.  Their not providing for such an account is indeed a virtue, for a Frege-style account, I will argue, presupposes a Cartesian perspec­tive that we have reason to reject.

 

 

           2.  FREGE'S CARTESIANISM

 

           Frege, like his recent critics, never does formulate--or even gesture towards--a comprehensive philosophical outlook.  His semantical work, at the same time, is grounded in strong intuitions about intentionality, the contents of thought, and related matters in metaphysics, epistemology, and the philo­sophy of mind.  There is, I submit, a big picture lurking in the wings.  I see in Frege's work the deep influence of the Cartesian tradition.  I have in mind here not so much specific Cartesian doctrines, as a tendency of mind, a way of approaching the philosophy of language and the philosophy of mind.  Frege's sense-refer­ence perspective, his emphasis on the connections between language and objective thought contents accessible to the mind, rather than on, say, the connections between language--thought of as a public, social institution--and the world, bespeaks this Cartesian influence.[11]

           Frege might well seem, however, a most unlikely neo-Carte­sian.  Frege himself, as Michael Dummett emphasizes, has played a crucial role in the 20th century anti-Cartesian revolution.  Frege's own revolutionary contribution, as Dummett notes, consisted in making the philosophical study of meaning, rather than skepticism and the theory of knowledge, the starting point in philosophy.  Frege, moreover, emphasized what we might call "the publi­city of thought content," the idea that the thoughts we express with language are not in principle private to the minds of individual think­ers, but are in the public, albeit a non-physical, domain. 

           Consider, however, the Fregean semantic perspective vis-a-vis the Cartesian "mirror-of-nature" tradition in the philosophy of mind.  That tradition, it is often noted, sees the mind as set against nature, as the repository of images and conceptual repre­sentations of things.  Pieces of language become meaning­ful by being associated with the conceptual representa­tions. Leaving aside the question of images, and the probably related Fregean "ideas," isn't this picture at least a very close relative of Frege's? 

           One difference, already noted, is Frege's anti-psycholo­gistic platonism, his insistence that senses do not reside in the mind, but rather in a third, objective realm.  Still, there is for Frege a realm of representations, distinct from the things represented and accessible to the mind, and linguis­tic expres­sions become meaningful only by being associated with these repre­sentations.[12] 

           Frege's making the representations abstract and therefore public entities may obscure, moreover, an important individual­istic strain in his view.  The reference of a proper name depends, for Frege, not upon anything like the role of the name in the public language, but rather upon the individual's associ­ating a particular sense with the name.[13]^,[14]

           Frege's view shares other characteristic features of a Carte­sian orienta­tion.  It is, Frege tells us, the represen­tations, senses, and not words, that refer in the primary instance.[15]  The reference of words is thus derivative from the refer­ence of senses.[16]  Proponents of a Cartesian orientation also characteristi­cally emphasize the clarity and distinctness of the representations, and make mathe­matical concepts the paradigm, and again, Frege is no exception. 

           So much for Frege's Cartesian perspective on individual terms and the conceptual representations with which they are associated.  The same themes reappear--perhaps more strikingly--when we consider Frege's treatment of language at the level of whole sentences.  Just as the vitality--to use Wittgen­stein's metaphor--of individual expressions derives from their associ­ation with senses, so the vitality of whole sentences derives from their association with sentential senses.  Just as the senses of singular terms, rather than the terms themselves, are the things that refer in the most basic sense, so sentential senses--the thought contents--are the primary bearers of truth and falsity.  Fregean thoughts, like their constit­uent senses, are well-defined and eternally existing.  They consti­tute, Frege tells us, the "common treasure of mankind."

           Frege, although his focus is directed towards Plato's heaven and not towards social practice, would acknowledge the platitude that natural language is a social, institutional arrangement.  That certain sentences get correlated with certain thought contents is, he would surely agree, an artifact of human institu­tional arrange­ments.  Frege would insist, however, that one's thinking a certain thought content is no matter of human conven­tion, institutional arrangement, or anything of the like.  It is a matter of one's mind grasping an objectively existing content.  More important, then, at least in a sense more important, than the fact that sentences express such "thoughts" is the fact that by uttering sentences we assert them, we give voice to the thought contents that we are thinking.  The traditional Fregean account of the "propositional attitudes,"  for example the idea that belief consists in a relation between a person and a thought content, emerges directly.

 

           3.  A SOCIAL, NATURALISTIC ALTERNATIVE

 

           Frege, we might say, puts forth a thought-driven[17] picture of language.  Language, if we overlook its imperfections, is thought externalized.  Frege's conception contrasts dramatically with the one I want to develop, the one I see ration­alizing the work of Frege's recent critics.  My picture shares much with, and owes a great deal to, that of Wittgenstein.[18]  Wittgen­stein, although some Fregeans are fond of claiming him for their own, gives voice to a radically different perspec­tive, one less representationalist, and arguably more naturalistic.  I don't want here to engage in Wittgenstein exegesis, an even trickier business than the question of how best to read Frege.  So let me just sketch my alternative.

           The approach I have in mind, in stark contrast to the Cartesian tradi­tion, denies that pieces of language become meaning­ful by being associated with representations, mental or objective.  It is here that the connections between Wittgenstein and contem­porary anti-Fregeans emerge most clearly.  Consider Putnam's slogan, slightly adapted:  Meaning ain't in, nor is it available to, the head.  Indeed, a central lesson of the Philo­sophical Investiga­tions, at least as I read it, is that there is much less available to the head than one might have supposed, and further that whatever is intellectually available is less relevant to philosophers' questions about language (and even thought) than one might have sup­posed.

           If the vitality of linguistic expressions is not a function of associated representations, of what is it a function?  The broadly Wittgensteinian answer is that the significance of a piece of language is a function of its embedded­ness in social, linguistic practice.  The problem for those of us--virtually everybody--brought up Cartesian is to make this more concrete, to somehow allow us to get the feel for how meaningfulness could be a function of anything other than representations.

           The Donnellan-Kripke historical chain picture--whether or not it provides the last word on its subject matter[19]--can be pressed into service here as suggest­ing a model of how significance might depend upon social practice, and not upon representa­tions.  An introduc­tory philosophy student, quite ignorant about Aristotle and his accomplish­ments, asks, "Who was Aristotle?  Was he the one who believed that everything was water?"  The name 'Aris­totle' as it occurs in the student's questions, surmises, and assertions, makes reference to Aristotle, our Aristotle, in virtue of--as the Donnellan-Kripke sketch goes--a historical chain of com­munication that stretches back to something like an original bap-tism.  Notice that the Donnellan-Kripke account gives the name a role in the public language; it functions as part of a public, name-using practice.  The name, as uttered on these oc­casions, has a conventional referent.[20]  The name connects to the referent, then, in virtue of a communal practice of using this name as a name for him, and not in virtue of the speaker's conceptual associations.

           Wittgenstein, in the service of a social practice picture, sometimes appears to urge that we drop talk of "meaning" in favor of talk of "use."  I don't know that we need follow this advice strictly, but there is surely something to be said for the idea.  Talk of "meaning" tends, for one thing, to suggest the very representa­tionalist picture we are at pains to supplant.  It tends to conjure up images of "grasping meanings," when there are--think about names from a Millian perspective--no meanings to grasp.  And thinking about linguistic competence in terms of grasping meanings encourages us to think about com­petence as involving theoretical knowledge, to think in terms of knowing that as opposed to the more appropriate knowing how.

           It is natural enough, moreover, to speak of "meaning" both in connection with communal linguistic practice and in connection with individual speaker's concep­tual associations.[21]  So meaning-talk, instead of helping us keep these topics distinct, encourages conflating them. Keeping them distinct is, of course, absolutely crucial from the point of view taken here.[22]

           The moral I want to draw is not that we need banish talk of meaning, but that we handle it with care.  Wittgenstein himself at times appears to urge not that we drop talk of meaning in favor of talk of use, but that we identify meaning with use.  We want to be careful, though, not to suggest that there isn't anything more to meaning, in any of its manifestations, than communal linguis­tic practice.  We might settle for the more modest methodological exhorta­tion that insofar as we do talk of meaning, we give pride of place to the social, specifi­cally to com­munal practice, rather than to individual, or even com­munity-wide, representa­tions.  Even when we turn to the Fregean's favorite questions about individual cognition--and we ought not do this too quickly, so the methodo­logical sermon continues--our prior study of meaning as use will be focal.  It is to court disaster to look first toward what is available to the individual conscious­ness for the clarification of virtually anything that comes under the rubric "meaning."

           Crucial to the outlook that I am recommending, then, is its rejection of Frege's thought-driven conception of language.[23]  One implication of the latter conception, an implication noted above, is that it is the conceptual representa­tions rather than their linguistic embodiments, that, in the first instance, refer.  The real action, as it were, takes place at a good distance from our social practices.  Such a conception makes it natural to suppose that the first step towards understanding how words refer is to understand how thoughts do so.[24]  Nothing could be farther from the truth according to our new picture.  What we seman­ticists study is not thought, but our social practices of talking about things.  Indeed, it becomes tempting, although it is no doubt too simple, to construe silent thought on the model of internal utterance.

           So far we have the bare bones of the more socially sensi­tive, naturalis­tic picture that I want to recommend.  I will soon turn to implications for the area of intersection of the philo­sophy of language and the philosophy of mind to which Fregeans have riveted our attention.  First, however, I want to more fully sketch my picture.  The additional features of my view that I will mention are important to the overall perspective, but they do not figure directly in the account of the cognitive dimension that I will offer.  I thus want to mention and motivate them here, but a full discus­sion will not be possible. 

 

           1) Clarity and distinctness.

           Frege attributes to the third realm entities that he takes to stand behind language, entities like senses and thought contents, an extreme, perhaps even absolute, refinement; they are necessarily clear and distinct.  Think here of Frege's comment, for which he took some chiding from Wit­tgenstein,[25] that a concept without boundaries is no concept at all. 

           Frege, of course, is not alone here.  There is a deep tendency in the representationalist tradition to attribute such purity to the representations, a tendency that has consequences for one's conception of language.  The ways in which the concep­tion of language may be affected are various.  Philosophers have sometimes seen language, or at least its more "respectable" parts, as itself possessing a kind of clarity and distinctness--as being associated, for example, with clear criteria that specify necessary and suffi­cient conditions of application. Alternatively, language may be seen as a mere dim reflection of the pristine realm, and the messiness of language attributed to our all-too-human ways of getting at the clear and distinct concepts.[26]  Either way, the background concep­tion of perfectly refined representations plays a dominating role. 

           Rejecting the representationalist picture may open the door to a dif­ferent way of thinking about linguistic practice.  It is here that we anti-Fregeans have most to learn from Wittgenstein.  A truly social, anti-represen­tationalist picture will not merely reject the ontology of objective or mental concepts.  It is not even enough to embrace the idea that meaningfulness is to be cashed out ultimately in terms of linguistic practice.  One might go this far, but remain in the grip of a picture of practice and its governing rules (or RULES) that derives from the rejected Cartesian perspec­tive.  One might well presuppose, and see semantics as the attempt to uncover--as indeed we anti-Fregeans have--a kind of rigidity on the part of the phenomena, a fixed­ness that the phenomena may in fact fail to exhibit.

           A detailed look at actual practice is out of the question here, but it will stand us in good stead to remind ourselves that our practices with words do not evolve from the attempt to capture in words, or communicate to others, pre-existent concepts that, almost by definition, possess the required refinement. 

           In the beginning--if the reader will indulge me one more time--there were the primitive brutes, bumping into each other and grunting, by way of indicat­ing to their fellows salient features of the environment.  Linguistic prac­tice, on this impressionistic picture, gets more articulated, more refined, as suits the practi­cal, social, and, eventually, intellectual needs of the brutes and their successors.  The crucial point is that whatever precision, articula­tion, refinement does evolve is a result of pressures of the sorts mentioned, and not a result of the desire to capture in words some absolutely precise Cartesian concepts.  The precision achieved is thus never "absolute," whatever that might mean, nor is there any absolute standard--like the Cartesian concepts--by which we might assess the precision of usage.

           To the extent one thinks that such a sketch roughly repre­sents the way things really go, to that extent one will be skeptical of philosophers' tendency to impute clarity and distinctness to usage, or to usage-when-it-is-up-to-snuff.  And to that extent, one will be sympathetic even to Wit­tgenstein's more radical "lack-of-regimentation" claims.

           Consider, for example, the putative "family resemblance" phenomenon.  Reflection upon actual linguistic practice with many general terms, 'game' for example, fails to reveal--urges Wittgen­stein--what the traditional picture led us to expect: a set of features common to all games, features that are individ­ually necessary and jointly sufficient for something to be a game.  Given our new picture, Wittgenstein's claims don't seem outlandish.  Why indeed can't there be terms the utility of which don't depend upon there being something substantive shared by the things to which the term applies?  Might there well not be utility to having a term that collects a range of things that are roughly similar to one another, things that fail to share any single feature, but that share a kind of family resemblance?[27]^,[28]

           Consider a related "lack of refinement" phenomenon, vague­ness, the fact that, for example, there are no sharp boundaries separating games from non-games.  The Cartesian can try to account for vagueness in any number of ways,[29] but, to be sure this phenomenon does not fit like hand-in-glove with the Carte­sian picture, and something will have to be said. 

           Far from being a source of pressure to our more natural­istic, social account, vagueness is entirely to be expected.  Remember, we don't start with pre-existent, sharply demarcated concepts, the common treasure of per­sonkind.[30]  Our practices with words are only as refined as they are, and there is no external standard (like how well they capture our conceptual representations) by which to measure them.  If there are cases that in practice rarely occur, for example, borderline cases of the applicability of a term, then it is likely that even a master of the term will not be able to say that the term either clearly does, or clearly does not, apply. This inability reflects not a lack of mastery, but rather reflects the fact that, as Wittgen­stein says, the borders have not yet been drawn.[31]

           An important component of the anti-representationalist picture is thus its expectation that usage will turn out to be considerably less regimented than we have supposed.  This is not to say that we can expect Wittgenstein's family resemblance picture to provide a generally applicable model.  The primitive brutes and their successors, after all, can become attuned to relatively stable aspects of their natural environments--for example, the water that they drink and bathe in--and come to have terms that apply in an at least somewhat, and perhaps drama­tically, less open-ended way.  Even pieces of language that seem more deeply institutional than do natural kind terms like 'water' may presumably vary widely in the degree of regimentation they exhibit.  Perhaps we should expect a continuum here. The point, though, is that we cannot simply proceed as we have, taking Kaplan's:

 

           The reference of the first-person pronoun is the agent of the context

 

as the model of what the semanticist should aim to uncover.[32]

 

 

           2)  Propositional content.

           Propositions, it is often noted, have been wanted as the bearers of truth, and as the "objects of propositional atti­tudes."  Frege's represen­tationalist picture makes it natural to let the sentence-level representa­tions, the Fregean thoughts, play these roles.  What, though, if we reject represen­tationalism in favor of the kind of perspective I am advocating?  What becomes of proposi­tions?

           The topic is, however, gigantic.  I can only sketch what I take to be the natural response, that a truly social and natural­istic conception will want to do without propositions.  I will briefly mention two sorts of considerations that seem to me to militate against propositions.

 

           a)  Naturalism.

           Kaplan has recently objected to the Platonistic conception of the individu­ation of words.  We suppose, he argues, that the distinction between word tokens and abstract types is the basis of the individuation of words.  Not so!  What makes your utter­ance of 'Aristotle' and mine two occurrences of the same word is not the supposed fact that both occurrences stand in a relation to some abstract stereotype that they instantiate, or are members of, an abstract type that inhabits Frege's third realm.  The worldly occurrences need to be linked in some more natural­istic way; their being occurrences of the same word must be a function of our social, linguistic interactions.[33] 

           I want to reject, in this same spirit, the notion that thought, belief, and assertion, for example, consist in relations to abstract entities.  The anti-Fregeans' "singular propositions" may appear to be more innocuous than Fregean thoughts, for singular propositions are abstract entities that have been, so to speak, brought down to earth.  Among their constituents, after all, are things like you and me. Even such propositions, however, seem to me objec­tionable from a naturalistic point of view.  Had we anti-Fregeans not started with Fregean thoughts and then made the appropriate amendments--replacing Frege's proposi­tional constituents, senses, with referents--would it have seemed natural to construe thought, belief, and assertion as involving relations between minds (or even persons) and abstract entities?  The very idea that thought, et al, involves such relations may well be a legacy of the Fregean/Carte­sian picture.

 

           b)  The messiness of linguistic practice.

           How does the propositions picture--explicated in terms either of Fregean thoughts or singular propositions--comport with that other implication of our social orientation, the fact that usage often fails to be sharply bounded, that usage is only as clear as it needs be?  Assume, for a moment, that Wittgenstein was correct, and that 'game' is a family resemblance term.  What proposition is expressed by 'That is a game'?  What, specifi­cally, are we to make of the predicate constituent?   The idea that the predicate constituent is the property of being a game surely doesn't comport well with our "family resemblance" account. 

           My question is whether the apparatus of propositions is compatible in spirit with the social orientation.  There is no question that it can be made compat­ible.  One might insist that the proposition does contain the property of being a game (or the sense of 'game'), it's just a fuzzy property (or sense), or something of the like.  Surely we can hang onto the notion of a proposi­tion, if we want to.  The question is whether the most natural way to work out a socially sensitive conception of language involves the notion of a proposi­tion.

           These remarks raise many questions, of course, questions about how, without propositions, we are to do the work tradition­ally assigned to them.  Are we to try to do without truth bearers?  If not, what will play that role?  How are we to construe belief, if not as involving a relation to a proposi­tion?  I cannot, of course, begin to deal with these questions here, but I will do so else­where.[34] 

           4.  INTENTIONALITY:  THE MISSING COGNITIVE FIX

 

           I turn now to the problems that have seemed to make life so difficult for anti-Fregeans.  Let's begin with what may appear to provide the anti-Fregean's most severe headache, the Cartesian intuition concerning intentionality, the problem of the missing cognitive fix.  The Cartesian idea that reference requires mental discrimination of a referent initially looks unassail­able.  Indeed, I have heard it said that this alone disqualifies the anti-Fregean's semantical views.  The Cartesian intentionality intuition takes on a very different look, however, when reconsid­ered from the vantage point of our more social, natural­istic picture.

           If we look at our actual practices, as Wittgenstein urged, rather than think about what they must be like, the "cognitive fix" requirement immediately begins to look suspicious, perhaps just plain wrong.  People often simply don't have much of a fix on the things to which they refer.  For one thing, as has been pointed out time and again, the beliefs that a speaker has about the referent of a name that he is using may be very far off the mark, and yet his reference is not affected.[35]  A philosophy student may mistakenly associate with 'Aris­totle' the properties of having taught Plato and having died of hemlock poisoning, and yet his utterances of the name, say on an exam, count as references to Aris­totle, our Aristotle.

           There are many cases, moreover, in which a competent speaker doesn't begin to possess the sort of information about his referent that would single out that referent, that would distin­guish the latter from many other things.  Felipe Alou, I know, was a major-league baseball player.  I don't know much else about him, surely not enough to individuate him in any serious way from many others, and yet I can use his name to say things about him.  Similarly, as Kripke points out, all that many people know about Cicero is that he was a Roman orator.[36]  Consider also Kripke's Gell-Mann and Feynman example in which a speaker competent with two names associates precisely the same (meager) information with each.  Such a speaker refers to Gell-Mann when he uses the latter's name, and to Feynman when he utters 'Feynman', despite the fact that the only distinctive thing he knows about either of them is that each is a leading theoretical physicist.  Putnam makes the same point with respect to the natural kind terms 'elm' and 'beech'. 

           Reference in the absence of an accurate cognitive fix looks miraculous, I submit, only to the Cartesian, or the residual Cartesian strain in us.  If pieces of language refer only in virtue of their being associated with representations, then it is miraculous that someone should refer to something in the absence of an appropriate representation.  This sense of miraculousness fades fast, however, when we bring the conception of a public language into sharp focus, a concep­tion suggested by the sorts of examples mentioned above.  What connects the student's utterance to Aristotle is not the student's cognitive fix on the Aristotle.  What connects utterance to referent is rather the fact that the student is using a linguistic device that, as our social practices go, refers to Aristotle.  Linguistic expres­sions, as parts of a public practice, attain a kind of life of their own.  One who uses a proper name participates in an institutional­ized practice, and refers to the name's conven­tional referent.[37]  Indeed, so far from their being an epistemological requirement of the sort supposed by the traditional picture, it rather seems that one of the crucial functions of proper names is to allow us to bridge great cognitive gulfs.  The public language thus makes it possible for us to speak about things even when our beliefs about them are very scanty, confused, even badly mistaken.  The examples that seem to show that reference does not require anything like a discriminating conception should not, then, seem astound­ing, or indeed at all surprising, at least not on our social picture.[38]  

           One with Cartesian intuitions might admit that underscoring the social and institutional character of natural language is the best way for the anti-Fregean to proceed:

 

                       Emphasizing that proper names are part of a public, institu­tional practice might well seem to make sense of the idea that a speaker need not have much of a cognitive fix on the things about which he speaks.  The effect of the anti-Fregean proposal, though, is to make speech and thought radically discontinuous--for such a cognitive fix is surely indispensible to thought--and such a radical discon­tinuity is just not acceptable.  If, in the Aris­totle-Socrates case above, for example, it is clear that the descriptions the speaker would offer really do take us to Socra­tes, then he surely was thinking about Socrates.  If, moreover, a speaker uses a name in the absence of a cognitive fix, then he really can't be thinking about anyone.

 

           So much in philosophy depends upon which phenomena one takes to be fundamental, where one starts.  The anti-Fregean focus has admittedly not been on thought, but on language, public language.  The Cartesian, believing as he does that this is the wrong place to begin, might well conclude that notwith­standing the apparent counterexamples drawn from actual communicative prac­tice, linguistic reference, unless it is to be divorced from thought, must require discriminating knowledge. 

           Alternatively, if one with Cartesian intuitions is impressed enough with the social and institutional character of natural language and with the anti-Fregeans' counterexamples, he might be willing to endorse the alleged discon­tinuity between thought and speech.[39]  "I'll give you speech," we might imagine him saying, "but thought is quite another thing."  The idea is that the correct interpretation of speech is perhaps, in the final analysis, in the public domain.  It is a matter of the conven­tions of the linguistic community, and really not a matter of what's in the head of the speaker.  What one thinks, on the other hand, is very much a matter of what's in (or available to) the head of the thinker.  An utterance of 'Aristotle wrote the Ethics', say in a philosophy class, counts as a reference to Aristotle, but if the speaker takes Aristotle to be the teacher of Plato, etc., his thought is directed upon Socrates.  What about one whose beliefs about Aristotle are so indefinite that they fail to discriminate anyone?   Perhaps such a speaker fails to be thinking about anyone.[40] 

           Emerging here again is the deep difference between a broadly Cartesian orientation, and the more social, naturalistic view.  It is no accident, no mere oversight, that anti-Fregeans have tended to begin with the study of public practices of communi­cation, practices that we tend to see as, so to speak, relatively out in the open.  Thought seems to us, or at least to me, a much more difficult and elusive topic, one with which we might do better had we some grip on our public communicative practices. 

           It thus makes good sense that the Cartesian would worry that we anti-Fregeans have distanced speech from thought in an extreme way.  My worry, on the other hand, is that the Cartesian, on the basis of his philosophical picture of thought, either denies what seems plain about speech (for example, that refer­ence does not require a cognitive fix), or else grants the latter, but insists on distancing thought from speech.  I don't believe that there is any such radical discontinuity between thought and speech, or that the approach taken here suggests such a discontinuity.  What seems dubious to me is what the Cartesian takes to be so obvious, the idea that if we restrict our attention to the question of about whom the speakers are thinking, it is clear that the background descriptions provide the decisive answer.

           Let's begin with examples in which speakers fail to have any sort of real cognitive fix, examples in which the background descriptions fail to in­dividuate.  Someone says, "Cicero was a Roman orator," and can't identify Cicero much further.  It seems very far-fetched, indeed altogether ad hoc, to suppose that such a perfectly competent and sincere speaker who fails to believe very much about Cicero, ipso facto fails to be thinking about the latter. Surely, in the example above, I was thinking about Felipe Alou. The phenomenon of reference in the absence of individuating informa­tion is so pervasive that the supposition in question would deny thought content to an extremely wide range of sincere utterances produced by reflective people.  This surely seems like the proverb­ial philosopher's view, as opposed to what seems plain to just about everyone.[41]  Thinking about something, it would seem, no more requires a cognitive fix than does speaking about something.

           Let's turn to the case of the speaker who has "mistaken beliefs," whose background descriptions fit not the referent of the uttered name, but rather someone else.  Consider the Aris­totle-Socrates case above.  There are, no doubt, examples of this sort with respect to which it will be perfectly natural to say that the speaker was thinking about the denotation of the background descrip­tions.  The question is whether this is necessarily so, whether the simple fact that the background descriptions take us to Socrates itself establishes that the speaker was thinking about Socrates.  It seems pretty clear, at least if we take our cue from our ordinary judgments, that the background descriptions do not play any such decisive role.  We would ordinarily say, after all, in many such cases, that the speaker expressed a mistaken belief, even a mistaken thought, about Aristotle.[42]

           Let's turn from our ordinary judgments, and get philosophi­cal.  The Fregean, in making the background descriptions deci­sive, gives a kind of cognitive priority to descriptions over names.  This is natural enough, given the Fregean outlook, including the cognitive fix requirement, modes of presenta­tion that are supposed to capture the cognitive perspective, and so on.  The question is, however, whether we ought to accept this inegalitarian treatment of names vis-a-vis descriptions. 

           The situation, after all, is that the speaker actually uttered a name that is, as our practices go, Aristotle's name.  It's true that in answer to a question about whom he was speaking he would have given a description that fit Socrates, but how does that make it the case that he was thinking of Socrates?  Why not say instead that he was thinking about the person named by the name that he used, that is Aristotle, and the background descrip­tions merely reveal his (in this case false) beliefs about that person.  In any case, the uttered name takes us to one person, the to-be-uttered-if-asked descriptions to another.  What, other than the disputed Cartesian picture, makes it so obvious that we should favor the latter? 

           My point here, as already indicated, is not that we ought always to give priority to the uttered name over the background descriptions, or that, more generally, whatever singular term is uttered should furnish the key to the referent-in-thought.  Sometimes, we ought indeed to privilege unuttered, background terms.  One might, for example, utter the name 'Jones' as a mere slip of the tongue, while thinking about, and intending to say something about, Smith.  Alternatively, one might mistakenly take 'Brown' to be the name of Harris, and, thinking about and intending to say something about Harris, one might use the name 'Brown'.  So a name other than the uttered name may deserve priority, and so may a background description.  Someone might, for example, be thinking about "the most ugly, and nasty, professional wrestler, whoever that is."  Thinking that the person in question is none other than Brutus Beefcake, the speaker may make a remark mentioning the latter by name.  If B.B. does not really fit the description, however, there may well be circum­stances in which it would be appropriate to say that the speaker was really thinking of "the most ugly, and nasty, professional wrestler, whoever that is," or even that he was thinking about the Iron Sheik, if the latter is indeed uglier and nastier than any other.

           We should not, then, expect a simple formula in answer to the question of how, in general, we are to determine which item it was about whom someone was thinking.[43]  My point here was not to provide such an answer, one that favors, say, uttered names over background descriptions.  It was merely to dispel the illusion that at least cognitively--if not semantically--names must be backed up by individuating concepts, and that the question of about whom someone is thinking when he utters a name is to be resolved by reference to that back­ground concept.  Whatever we do, in the end, with the thorny problem of reference in thought, it is far from clear that the Cartesian spirited Fregean idea, the contention that the descriptions-to-be-uttered-if-asked must be decisive, has much merit.[44]

           I will conclude this section with some remarks on the implications of my view for another topic that deserves book-length treatment, that of silent thought.  It is sometimes supposed that the Car­tesian intentionality intuition has a kind of obvious plausibility when it comes to silent thought episodes; that somehow silent thought, as opposed to overt speech, is a most natural candidate for the Cartesian picture.  Consider again someone who, although ignorant of Cicero's accomplishments (say other than being a Roman orator), uses the name pretty much as we all do.  We are ordinarily willing to ascribe thoughts about Cicero to such a person when he says things like "I know who Cicero was.  He was a Roman orator."  Isn't it equally clear that he is in a position to have silent thoughts about Cicero?  Surely it's not the verbalization that makes thought about Cicero possible. 

           Being a participant in a name using practice, specifically, being competent with 'Cicero', our speaker is in a position to use the name not only in overt speech episodes, but also in silent thought.  Do names, then, actually occur in silent thought episodes?  Are there at least some such episodes that amount to internal utterance?  My point does not depend on positive answers to these questions.  Whether or not his silent thought that Cicero was an orator amounts to his silently rehearsing this sentence--indeed however we understand silent thought episodes--his competence with the name, his participation in the practice, puts him in a position to have the thought that he would express, were he to put it into words, as "Cicero was an orator."   Not only does the refer­ence of an utterance not depend upon one's cognitive fix, the reference of one's silent thought similarly does not depend upon "what's in the head."  This will, of course, seem preposterous from a Cartesian point of view.

 

                   ⁵.  HOW PUZZLING IS FREGE'S PUZZLE?

 

           Frege's discussion of cognitive significance, at the beginning of "On Sense and Reference," is focused upon his famous puzzle about informative identity sentences.  How, Frege wants to know, are we to explain the dif­ference in "cognitive value" between the trivial 'Hesperus is Hesperus' and the informa­tive 'Hesperus is Phosphorus', that fact that these sentences formu­late different thoughts? 

           Frege's focus on identity-sentences is not altogether salutary, for contrary to its suggestion, the fundamental problem about the cognitive dimension of language with which Frege was centrally concerned has nothing special to do with identity.  Frege's fundamental problem was that of account­ing for the fact that a mere change of one co-referring name for another can affect a change, indeed a very significant change, in the thought content of a sentence.  Frege might well have avoided identity, with all its attendant perplexities, and have asked for the explanation of the difference in cogni­tive value between 'Hesperus is a planet' and the corresponding "Phosphorus" sentence.[45]

           Frege's discussion--let's focus on the two sentences just mentioned--draws attention to what I'll call "Frege's data," to cognitive phenomena of undeni­able importance:  One might understand both sentences, for example, but be willing to assert only one of them, even emphatically deny the other.  Alternatively, one might find, say, the "Hes­perus" sentence old hat, but the "Phosphorus" sentence highly informative.  Finally, one might behave quite differently depending upon which of these sentences he accepts.

           Frege's data are both uncontroversial and uncontroversially important, but the lessons Frege would have us learn from them are far from uncon­trover­sial. The most notorious lesson, quite obvious­ly controver­sial, is Frege's sense-reference approach to semantics.  There is, however, a more subtle, prior message that Frege takes the cognitive phenomena to convey, a putative implication that can be made to seem almost like a datum itself.  Notice that in formulating Frege's puzzle in the first two paragraphs of this section, I gloss "difference in cognitive value," as "difference in thoughts expressed."  Frege's contention that the two sentences express different thoughts, distinct proposi­tional contents--a natural enough contention given Frege's thought-oriented approach--is far from uncontroversial.

           One might, for example, insist, in the spirit of the Russell-Kaplan singular propositions picture, that 'Hesperus is a planet' and 'Phosphorus is a planet' express the same proposition.  Alternatively, one might, in the spirit of the naturalistic approach I've been advocating, try to make do without proposi­tions, without unified things that are, as Strawson once put it, the upshots of assertive utterances.  Frege's quasi-datum is surely contestable.  What we cannot contest, however, and what I want to explain, are what I've dubbed "Frege's data," the cognitive phenomena that, for Frege, made it plain that different thought contents were indeed expressed by the respective sentences. 

           Let's keep in mind that our project is not to make good on the alleged cognitive failures of the anti-Fregean semantic approach.  Having made the distinction between semantics, on the anthropolog­ical concep­tion, and the study of cognitive sig­nificance, the anti-Fregean ought not to be embarrassed that, say, Mill's remarks on names (or those of Donnellan and Kripke) do not im­mediately address Frege's data.  At the same time, the output of anthropological semantics ought to cohere with a more general account of language and thought, one that must address Frege's data.  How, then, might one approach the cognitive phenomena if one takes a broadly Millian approach to the semantics of proper names?

           It is striking that even those who have led the revolt against the Fregean orientation have approached the explanation of the cognitive phenomena in way more suited to the Fregean, representa­tionalist picture.  To the represen­tational­ist, the obvious and only way to explain differences in the cognitive roles of expressions is in terms of differences in associated represen­tations.  Kaplan, to mention a prominent example, tries to account for the difference in cognitive roles of indexical expressions, by resurrecting modes of presenta­tion, not Fregean senses mind you, but more kosher "ways in which agents represent the referen­ces of their terms."[46]            

           The appeal of the representationalist picture, here as before, is a function of the fact that, as Wittgenstein says, we are its captives.  It is difficult to so much as conceive an alternative, even in bare outlines.  If 'Hesperus is a planet' differs cognitively for an agent from the cor­responding "Phosphorus" sentence, doesn't this have to be because he is thinking of the referent in two different ways, because he is employing two different cogni­tive perspectives.  If someone finds 'Hesperus = Phosphorus' informative, doesn't this have to be because he associates a different way of thinking (or mode of presentation or cognitive perspective) with the left hand side of the equation than he does with the right hand side?  How else might we begin to explain the obvious cognitive differen­ces?

           I have argued elsewhere against the Kaplan-Perry approach to the cogni­tive significance of indexicals.[47]  While I stressed there the Fregean flavor of that approach,[48] I was not sufficiently focused upon what I now see as, especially in Kaplan's case, the most salient similarity with Frege, Kaplan's representation­alism.  He, no less than Frege, explains cognitive differences between expressions as differences in their associated modes of presentation.[49]  Here I want to urge that we abandon representa­tionalism even in the study of the cognitive sig­nificance phenomena.  Modes of presentation, no matter how liberalized and attenuated, remain spiritual descendants of the Fregean approach.  Reflection on some of the anti-Fregean discussions of proper names, moreover, should convince at least the discussants that no such represen­tationalist approach, no matter how benign its representationalism, has any future. 

           I have in mind here Kripke's Gell-Mann-Feynman case, and Putnam's Elm-Beech story.  The original point of these examples was to show that reference does not depend upon what's in the head, upon the information that the speaker associates with the expressions.[50]   Don't these examples indicate, no less force­ful­ly, that cognitive significance doesn't depend upon the associated information?  'Gell-Mann' and 'Feynman', after all, can play cognitively in­equivalent roles for a speaker despite the fact that the speaker's associated "conceptual files" are identical.

           We can make the same point--that cognitive significance is not a matter of associated information--with names that, unlike 'Gell-Mann' and 'Feynman', co-refer.  Someone might acquire the names 'Cicero' and 'Tully', associating with them precisely the same informa­tion, say "a famous Roman."  Still the names may differ in "cognitive value."  It may never strike the speaker that only one person may be in question, and so he may react very differently to sentences that contain one name, that to those that contain the other.  The anti-Fregean explanation of the cognitive difference between 'Cicero' and 'Tully', then, given our own examples, better not rely upon necessary differences in associated informa­tion, that is upon different modes of presentation.[51]

           My proposal, then, is that we forget modes of presentation, and take a fresh look at the data to which Frege drew our attention.  I urged in the last section that the Cartesian intentionality intuition--remember how unassailable it seemed at first--takes on a very different look when considered from the vantage point of our more social, naturalistic picture.  The same can be said for the highly-plausible-if-you've-been-brought-up-on-Frege idea that to explain a difference in the cognitive roles of expressions one must appeal to a difference in cognitive perspectives.

           Let's begin with the reflection that the more epistemology one builds into linguistic competence with names, that is, the more of a cognitive fix one requires, the more it will seem that Frege's data present not merely interest­ing and important phenomena to be explained, but a prima facie problem, a puzzle.  Why is this?  The thesis that linguistic competence with names requires mental apprehension of their referents induces a tension between two names co-refer­ring, and their being cognitively inequivalent.  If in using each of the two names one must be in cognitive touch with their single referent, how can this identity of reference have escaped notice?

           Indeed, if one raises the epistemic stakes enough, it will be impossible to have co-referring names that differ cognitively.  Imagine, to take a fanciful example, that we required that a name user be omniscient about the referent.  It would then be impossible to be competent with two co-referring names without realizing that only one referent was in question.  Co-referring names could then not differ in cognitive signifi­cance.

            Let's go to the other extreme.  Although for present purposes we can consider this another fanciful example, anti-Fregeans have sometimes suggested a "no-epistemology" picture of linguistic competence.  One might, on this view, possess radi­cally mistaken beliefs about the referent of a name, or virtually no beliefs at all, and still be in a position to use the name as a name for its socially determined referent.  Smith, on the periphery of a conversation between mathematicians in which the name 'Joan' is used as a name for a theorem, mistakenly takes Joan to be a woman.  Alterna­tively, Smith comes away com­pletely unsure of who or what Joan is.  In either of these cases, on the no-epistemology view, one may still be in a position to say things about the referent, that is the theorem, by using the name.  One might, for example, speculate about Joan's properties, or ask who or what Joan is.

           If one thus doesn't need to know virtually anything about the referent, it is very easy to see how one could pick up two co-referring names, and not know that they had a single referent.  The no-epistemology theorist, since he doesn't think that competence requires mental apprehension of the referent, will thus not see Frege's data as presenting a serious and difficult problem, a real puzzle.  Indeed, the explanation of the fact that 'Cicero' and 'Tully' might play different cognitive roles--and not much of an explanation is really needed--would involve simply pointing out that competence with two names does not put one in a position to know whether or not the names co-refer.  How could it, given that competence requires no knowledge of the referent?

           Frege advanced a view intermediate between "omniscience" and "no-epis­temol­ogy," that a name user need attach to the name a purely qualitative concept that he takes to single out a referent.  This is, of course, far from requir­ing omnis­cience--much farther, say, than Russell's direct acquain­tance requirement[52]--and it allows for a cognitive difference between co-referring names.  Like the omniscience view, however, it demands a substantive cognitive fix--something intellectually available to the speaker must mentally focus him on the referent.  A consequence is that, compared to the no-epistemology view, a more substantive explanation of two co-referring names differing cognitively is required.  If one is really mentally focused on the same thing twice, why doesn't he know it?  Frege's view yields a natural answer, of course.  One might not know that a single thing is in question because his focus is not direct, so to speak, as it was for Russell, but is mediated by a concept.  If he is focused upon the same thing twice, but by means of different concepts, he well may not realize that the same thing is in question. 

           We are now in a position to see how the perspective I've been outlining in this paper yields a distinctively non-Fregean approach to the cognitive phenom­ena.  While I have not plumbed the depths of how little need be in the head in order to use a name--I have not subscribed to the no-epistemology view--the use of a name, on my account, emphatically does not involve a substantial cognitive fix, the mental apprehension of a referent.  Indeed, one of the functions of names is to allow a speaker (or thinker) to bridge great cognitive gaps, to allow one to speak about things in the absence of anything like individuating concep­tions.  A consequence is that, just as on the no-epis­temology view, the cognitive phenomena no longer have the air of paradox.  The use of a name doesn't require mental apprehension of its referent, and so there is no puzzle, no special problem, about how a speaker might be competent with co-referring names and yet not know that they co-refer.  Given how little one needs to know (or even believe) about the referent to be competent with a name, there is no presump­tion that a speaker will know of two co-referring names in his vocabulary, that they co-refer.

           I have been emphasizing the fact that the more social outlook dispels any sense of paradox concerning Frege's data.  What seems even more impor­tant is that we now have a new form of explanation of Frege's data, one radically different from that suggested by the traditional representationalist account.  The powerful grip of the latter led us to suppose that the only way to explain a cognitive difference was in terms of a difference in mode of presenta­tion.  And anti-Fregeans, laboring under this supposition, have been raking the leaves, as it were, to somehow retrieve such representational differences.  Notice that cognitive perspectives, modes of presenta­tion, have no role in our new form of explanation.  We don't look into the speaker's head and find two different conceptual files in terms of which we can now see why 'Cicero' and 'Tully' play different cognitive roles for him.  We rather reflect upon the fact that given how little need be in his head, his mere competence with the names puts him in no position to decide the question of whether or not these names co-refer.  Indeed, as noted above, were we to look inside his head, we might find identical conceptual files for each of two cognitively distinct names.  We might, of course, find different conceptual files, say "being a famous Roman orator" associated with 'Cicero', and "being a famous Roman politician" with 'Tully'.  Such a difference, however, doesn't affect our explanation of what makes it possible for him to wonder whether Cicero was Tully.  Such wonder is not rendered more intelligible by the difference in conceptual files.  A competent speaker, given how little he need know or even believe about the references of names, might well raise the question even if both files had included merely "is a famous Roman."[53] 

 

           I began this essay with the distinction between two conceptions of seman­tics, Fregean and anthropological.  The attention of the anthropological seman­ticist, I argued, is not focused upon the cognitive dimension that, under Frege's influence, has seized center stage.  If it turns out that the anthropolog­ical semanticist's work fails to provide much help in the explication of the cognitive dimension, so be it.  Much to our surprise, however, the anti-Fregean semantical approach, at least when embedded in the sort of outlook I've been recommend­ing, yields a most natural approach to the cognitive dimension.  Central to this approach is the outright rejection, argued for in Section 4 above, of the Cartesian intentionality intuition.  To put the point in a more positive way, linguistic contact with things--reference, that is--does not presuppose epistemic contact with them.  Underscoring this deep lesson of the anti-Fregean revolution leads, as we have just seen, to a radically non-Fregean account of the Fregean's favorite topic, the cognitive significance of language.[54]

 

 

 

ENDNOTES