On Fregean Sense and Mental Content

Abstract

Fregeans follow Frege (1892) in accepting informativeness and substitution failure as reliable criteria for the existence of senses as objects of thought. In this paper I show that if we accept this, we must also accept the existence of an infinite hierarchy of senses as objects of thought. This is a bad result since it turns Fregeanism into a doctrine according to which object-related thoughts either have an infinite number of objects as contents or none at all. This shows, against the Fregean, that senses cannot themselves be constituents of thought.

Keywords

• reference
• individuation
• determination