Abstract
Departing from the dominant theories of Frege, Russell and Mill, Kit Fine has sketched a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle in his book Semantic Relationism. In this article, I briefly discuss the puzzle in its various forms and the attempted solutions of Frege and Russell. I then explicate the essential features of the new theory and critically appraise the mechanism suggested by Fine to solve the puzzle. I show that Semantic Relationism fails to address the concerns raised in the puzzle.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
See (48). One may know that Paderewski is a brilliant pianist (having heard him at a concert) and also that he is a charismatic statesman (having observed him at a political rally), without realizing that it is the same person who is both. Therefore, the expression "Paderewski = Paderewski" fails Fine's test (40) of semantic facts. One can sensibly doubt whether both occurrences in the expression relate the same object.
See (46). Fine narrates the following story: when Carl Hempel, the famous philosopher of science, moved to Princeton, some of the philosophers there found the name “Carl” too Germanic for their taste and decided to use the English name “Peter” in its place. It is not that they re-christened Hempel with the name “Peter”; rather, they decided to use the name “Peter” as a variant of the name “Carl”…… it is a convention,……that the name “Peter” should be coreferential with “Carl.” Someone who had competency in the use of each name but failed to recognize that the two names were coreferential would thereby display his lack of understanding of the….language.
Here one cannot object that X is semantically incompetent with respect to the name "Z" because (1) she is acquainted with both of its referents, (2) she knows that both have the name Z and (3) there are plausibly many discourses wherein she can clearly ascertain which person is being referred to by the name Z. (e.g., she can clearly tell in which case the utterance "Z has such-and-such appearance" is true).
References
Fine, K. (2007). Semantic relationism. New York: Wiley-Blackwell.
Fine, K. (2010a). Comments on Scott Soames “Coordination problems”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(2), 475–484.
Fine, K. (2010b). Reply to Lawlor’s “Varieties of coreference”. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(2), 496–501.
Frege, G. (1948). Sense and reference. The Philosophical Review, 57(3), 209–230.
Lawlor, K. (2010). Varieties of coreference. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 81(2), 485–495.
McKay, T., & Nelson, M. (2014). Propositional attitude reports. In E. N. Zalta (Ed.), The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/prop-attitude-reports/.
Pickel, B., & Rabern, B. (2017). Does semantic relationism solve Frege’s puzzle? Journal of Philosophical Logic, 46(1), 97–118.
Russell, B. (1905). On denoting. Mind, 14(56), 479–493.
Salmon, N. (1992). Frege’s puzzle, Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, 1992; originally published by MIT Press in 1986.
Soames, S. (2010). Coordination problems. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 2, 464–474.
Unnsteinsson, E. (2018). Frege’s puzzle is about identity after all. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. https://doi.org/10.1111/phpr.12516.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer of this journal for extremely helpful comments which helped me to revise the paper substantially.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Barua, S. Frege’s Puzzle and Semantic Relationism. J. Indian Counc. Philos. Res. 36, 197–210 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0164-8
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40961-018-0164-8