Frege’s Puzzle

"Yes, it is. Nathan wrote the draft of this book when he and I were both assistant professors at Princeton. We had something in common because we had both been influenced by two of my other authors – David Kaplan and Saul Kripke – who had revived and expanded an old idea going back to John Stuart Mill and Bertrand Russell. The idea is that the meanings of many of our words are simply things in the world they stand for, rather than ideas in our minds. This idea seemed revolutionary at the time because, since Frege, it had been thought that meanings must be internally and transparently accessible to our minds. Frege had convinced people of this using an argument known as ‘Frege’s puzzle’ in one of his most famous papers in 1892. The Kripke book had challenged Frege’s idea and the Kaplan paper had done so too, but no one had taken apart Frege’s puzzle argument in a very convincing way until Nathan made real progress doing just that. Although the point remains controversial, Nathan’s book took us a long way in the right direction. There are two parts to my book. In part one, I identify and explain what I take to be the most important lessons to be drawn about language from work in the last century and a quarter. In part two I sketch my own vision of what needs to be done to solve today’s problems and indicate what I believe to be the direction of future progress. My discussion of the authors I have spoken to you about is mostly in part one. In part two I push forward in four main ways. First, I sketch a new theory of what propositions – thought of as meanings of sentences as well as objects of belief and knowledge – really are. Second, I use propositions to explain what possible states of the world are, where our knowledge of them comes from, and how epistemologically possible world-states are related to metaphysically possible world-states. This is needed to explain the truth conditions of sentences, and the difference between necessary and a priori truths. Third, I investigate surprising new aspects of the interaction of indexicality with a priori knowledge. Last, I integrate my own recent thinking with that of others in spelling out how linguistic meaning (semantics) relates to many other aspects of language use (pragmatics) in determining what is asserted, implicated and communicated by our uses of language."