ABSTRACT
Explanations of action in the Socratic tradition seem therefore to belong to two worlds: the world of propositions and their logical relations, and the world of everyday events in which human beings take attitudes. A number of alternatives to Fregean semantics have been proposed. Frege's point of departure was what the essential function of any language is to enable its speakers to make utterances that are true or false. More complex sentences are constructed out of these simple ones in ways Frege's work was to make familiar: by employing conjunctions and other operators, and by substituting variables for individual names or for predicates and then quantifying. Frege's doctrine that the sense of a sentence is made up of the senses of its parts is incompatible with his doctrine that first-level predicates stand for functions from individual objects to truth-values. Michael Dummett has argued that the semantics of sentences about propositional attitudes can be elucidated within a Fregean theory.
