ABSTRACT
By ‘Fregean descriptivism’, people mean the position attributed to Frege by Kripke. It is a view about proper names that is frequently contrasted with that of John Stuart Mill. ‘Proper names’, writes Mill, ‘are not connotative: they denote the individuals who are called by them; but they do not indicate or imply any attributes as belonging to those individuals’. While it is debatable whether he holds, by contrast with Mill, that proper names are connotative, Frege splits the notion of the meaning of a proper name into two components, which he calls ‘Sinn’ and ‘Bedeutung’. Name descriptivism and sense descriptivism are both elements of meaning descriptivism, but name descriptivism, which neither mentions nor alludes to the notion of sense, does not entail sense descriptivism. There appears to be little evidence, other than the evidence that Frege was a sense descriptivist, for taking him to have been a name descriptivist.
