Sense and Linguistic Meaning: a Solution to the Burge-kripke Conflict

1 1. Burge on Sense and Meaning When " Sinning Against Frege " was published in 1979 I thought it should have given a real turn in the discussion on Frege's ideas. Actually the impact was less then I imagined, and the problem was that – at the end of the story – Tyler Burge's interpretation should have posed a shadow on the direct reference theories and the Millean criticism of descriptivist theories of proper names, based on the criticism of the identification of Frege's notion of sense with linguistic meaning or connotation 2. In fact Burge (1979) claims that the identification of Frege's notion of sense with the notion of linguistic meaning is a " basic misunderstanding " of Frege's work 3. This claim implies that Fregean senses are not like Mill's connotations; therefore many direct-reference criticisms against Frege, which are grounded on Mill's claims that * University of Genoa, Italy, [email protected]. 1 A short version of this paper should have been given at the Wismar Conference on Frege (Penco 2013), where I was unable to go. I wish to thank Diego Marconi, Filippo Domaneschi and Massimiliano Vignolo for comments on an earlier version of the paper, Pieranna Garavaso for her encouragment and remarks on the general approach and the audience of a talk held in Rome for the conference on Frege organized by Rosaria Egidi in 2011. 2 Kripke needs the identification of sense and linguistic meaning to justify his standard criticism of the descriptivist theory of proper names, based on the supposed confusion made by Frege between " giving the reference " and " giving the meaning " or " giving a synonym ". However, Krikpe's criticism has also been at the origin of a new consideration of a tension between different roles played by the Fregean Sinn, starting with Dummett (1981, pp. 99ss. and 126-129) who discusses cases in which we can see " Frege's failure to separate the different ingredients of his notion of sense " (that is the way in which the referent of an expression is given to us and its conventional significance). 3 My concern here is mainly on the critique Burge poses on the identification of sense and meaning; I will not discuss other worries on Burge's proposal of a proper metaphysical view of abstract entities. This last aspect has been much debated since Weiner (1995), but will be only indirectly …