Frege i semantyka języka naturalnego (Frege and the Semantics of Natural Language). Prinicipia, 15, 1996, 177-190.

Abstract

In this paper, I examine Gottlob Frege’s semantic ideas and assess the extent to which they can be applied to the analysis of natural language. I focus on the remarkable fact that speakers are able to understand and produce potentially infinitely many novel sentences on the basis of a finite linguistic sample. Rather than engaging in a polemic about the adequacy of neo-Fregean semantics, my aim is to clarify the conceptual terrain for future discussion. To this end, I formulate three conditions that any semantic theory inspired by Frege should satisfy: the association of expressions with semantic values in an extensional context, the distinction between meaning and sense as two interdependent levels of semantic representation, and the determination of the semantic representation of complex expressions by that of their constituents. I discuss Frege’s theories of meaning and sense, relate them to Davidson’s truth-conditional semantics, and evaluate how well they account for compositionality and understanding in natural language.