UBC philosophy professor Dominic Alford-Duguid will give an in-person colloquium. The title and abstract are below.
Does Frege’s Puzzle Generalise?
Gottlob Frege’s seminal papers ‘On Function and Concept’ and ‘On Sense and Reference’ established a foundation for modern semantics. These papers were also the birthplace of Frege’s famous (and infamous) distinction between sense and reference. Standard presentations of this distinction appeal to cases that generate so-called ‘Frege Puzzles’. These are cases that involve co-referential singular terms. Yet Frege (and later followers) understood the distinction between sense and reference to extend to every category of semantically significant expression. Can this generalisation be justified by appeal to Frege’s puzzles beyond the singular case? This is the talk’s framing question. At issue, ultimately, are the fundamental ambitions of semantic theorising: what must a semantic theory capture, and why must it capture it?
