The Meaning Of Metaphysics

The problem of sense has been at the center of philosophy of language, ever since Frege first coined the term and distinguished it from reference. This dissertation, based on Frege’s project of philosophical semantics and the leading theories and debates surrounding the notion of sense, attempts a systematic study of it, and to develop a new theory of sense. The deep motivations and various ways of distinguishing sense and reference will be revealed, in Chapter One, by casting deep into Frege’s considerations of the nature of arithmetic and logic. This makes it explicit that the metaphysical reality of sense grounds its semantical, epistemological and psychological roles. And that justifies our metaphysical study of the notion of sense.What was later called Frege’s puzzle, which appears at the opening passage of "On Sense and Reference", has served as the point of taking off for most interpretations of sense. They have, as Chapter Two shows, in one way or another, attempted to capture its semantical, epistemological or psychological roles, thus largely neglecting, without due, its metaphysical role. The much hostility and various attacks levelled towards the notion of sense, ever since Russell, constitutes a leading theme in philosophy of language. Chapter Three surveys some of their typical strategies and classical arguments, and reveals the motivation behind the rise of Russellianism. The notion of singular proposition, Chapter Four argues, has its own problems, metaphysically or semantically.Chapter Five strats with the notional connection between the notion of meaning and that of possibility, and paves the way for accommodating sense through the notion of possible worlds. Standard practises of possible-world semantics impose a certain group of requirements upon the notion of a possible world, which, we argued, no current theories of possible worlds really satisfy all at once. We developed a new picture of possible worlds, in Chapter Six, which we call the "River-picture", and argued for the reality of possible worlds under it. By adopting Kaplan’s distintion between "context of use and circumstance of evaluation", Chapter Seven shows how Fregean sense can be reduced to constituents of possible worlds of the "River-picture", and its metaphysical reality could be captured therein. We concluded by indicating how scepticism of sense could be accomodated in our theory.