ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the problems in the naive theory that motivated Gottlob Frege's theory and presents a version of Frege's theory, or Fregean semantics. Rudolf Carnap developed Fregean themes in his Introduction to Semantics and Meaning and Necessity; he had attended courses with Frege in the early 1910s. Michael Dummett did the most to establish Frege's name at the top of analytic philosophy with a series of great books about him starting with Frege: Philosophy of Language. Frege held something like the naïve theory in his early work. Frege draws the sense-reference distinction for all expressions. Frege calls the proposition expressed by a sentence a thought. The sense of a sentence is a thought. Frege's actual view of predicates is a somewhat delicate matter. Frege calls functions whose values are truth-values concepts. The terminology is unfortunate because it seems more appropriate to call the senses of predicates by that word, as indeed did the great Fregean, Alonzo Church.
