Husserl and Frege on Sense CHRISTIAN BEYER Abstract: This article presents and compares Frege's and Husserl's conceptions of sense, also taking into account their 1891 and 1906 correspondence. It is argued that while the similarities between their views speak in favour of a Fregean interpretation of Husserl's notion of noematic sense, there are also important differences. With regard to the latter, it is argued that Husserl's view yields a more general criterion of propositional difference and also provides a more detailed conception of the use of indexicals and non-descriptive singular terms, and of (what determines) their reference. In this context, Husserl's conceptions of constitution and genetic constitution analysis, respectively, are invoked and interpreted in terms of the epistemic notion of processing mental files or individual “concepts” (as Husserl calls them). Keywords: Frege, Husserl, sense, meaning, reference, Thought identity, intentional content, perception, constitution, individual concepts, mental files, states of affairs, indexicals, singular terms. 0. Introduction In the last decade of the ninenteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, there was a debate between Edmund Husserl and Gottlob Frege on what Frege calls sense . I shall start by briefly describing some aspects of the first (1891) phase of this debate (section 1). Following this, I present Frege's main arguments for the distinction between sense and reference and some of his most important theses regarding sense (section 2), in order to set the stage for both the presentation of the second (1906) and last phase of the debate (section 3) and for further comparison between Frege and Husserl in the course of my presentation of some important features of Husserl's conception of sense (section 4). It is obvious that a comparison such as this is also highly relevant for the evaluation of the so-called Fregean interpretation of Husserl’s notion of noematic sense, and it will become clear along the way that this interpretation is basically correct, despite a number of crucial differences between Frege's and Husserl's views. Furthermore, it would seem to be a promising line of research to compare this notion to more recent conceptions of sense and content and to discuss its merits as compared to them. Following this line would however go beyond the scope of this contribution. 1 1The interested reader is referred to Beyer 2000, which relates the notion of noematic sense to neo-Russellian and neo-Fregean approaches and highlights some of its merits, and Beyer 2015a, which relates it to the debate about radical contextualism vs. semantic minimalism, among other things. 1