ABSTRACT
According to Evans, Frege’s theory of Bedeutung (which Evans translates as “Meaning” or as “semantic value”) starts with the idea that the significance of a complete sentence consists in its being true or false (1982: 8).1 Given this starting-point, Evans continues, it was natural that Frege should think of the semantic power of an expression as the power to affect the truth-value of sentences in which it occurs: and natural, as a further step, to think of this power as determined by the expression’s being associated with some extralinguistic entity. This entity he called the Bedeutung. For singular terms, he identified it with what one would ordinarily call their reference, an identification which Evans says “makes evident good sense” (p. 9) provided that we are setting aside non-extensional contexts.
