ABSTRACT
Frege’s Puzzle is a founding problem in analytic philosophy. It lies at the intersection of central topics in the philosophy of language and mind: the theory of reference, the nature of propositional attitudes, the nature of semantic theorizing, the relation between semantics and pragmatics, etc. The puzzle concerns the relation between the referential significance of a sentence (or utterance)—i.e., the way it portrays properties and relations as distributed over objects—and its cognitive significance. He proposed to explain differences in cognitive significance between Frege-pairs with differences in sense, and so developed a theory of the role that sense played in linguistic understanding and semantics. Speakers understand an expression by being in cognitive contact with its sense (by ‘grasping’ it). Frege’s Puzzle appears to offer two distinct, but related, challenges: to explain the difference in cognitive significance between Frege-paired ‘simple sentences’; and to explain the apparent differences in truth-conditions of Frege-paired ascriptions.
