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- Title
Informational Semantics and Frege Cases.
- Authors
Rellihan, Matthew
- Abstract
One of the most important objections to information-based semantic theories is that they are incapable of explaining Frege cases. The worry is that if a concept's intentional content is a function of its informational content, as such theories propose, then it would appear that coreferring expressions have to be synonymous, and if this is true, it's difficult to see how an agent could believe that a is F without believing that b is F whenever a and b are identical. I argue that this appearance is deceptive. If we heed the distinction between the analog and digital contents of a signal, it is actually possible to reconstruct something akin to Frege's sense/reference distinction in purely information-theoretic terms. This allows informational semanticists to treat coreferring expressions as semantically distinct and to solve Frege cases in the same way that Frege did-namely, by appealing to the different contents of coreferring expressions.
- Subjects
THEORY of knowledge; SEMANTICS; EXPRESSIVE behavior; CONDITIONALS (Logic); THOUGHT &; thinking; BELIEF &; doubt
- Publication
Acta Analytica, 2013, Vol 28, Issue 3, p267
- ISSN
0353-5150
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1007/s12136-012-0183-z