ABSTRACT
This chapter begins by looking at Gottlob Frege's reasons for thinking that it has to appeal to some other semantic property in addition to semantic value in the account of the intuitive notion of meaning: the property of having a sense. The introduction of sense enables Frege to solve the problem of bearerless names. The chapter considers how Frege uses the introduction of sense to solve the problem of substitution into belief contexts. Frege's solution to the problem of informativeness has an odd consequence. The difficulty is that Frege's solution to the problem of informativeness appears to rule out the intuitive description of the analytic project. For Frege, whether or not a sentence is grammatically well-formed is determined by syntactical rules. The chapter looks at important papers on reference by P. F. Strawson and keith Donnellan, followed by a brief account of the causal-historical theory of reference that Kripke proposes as an alternative to those of Frege and Bertrand Russell.
