CHAPTER FOUR SENSE AND MODE OF PRESENTATION H.G. Callaway Temple University HG1Callaway@Gmail.com Theories of linguistic meaning have been a major influence in twentieth century philosophy. 1 This is due, in part, to the assumption that meaning is the crucial and interesting thing about language. To know the meaning of an expression is to understand it, and since understanding is central to philosophy in many different ways, it should be no surprise that the notion of meaning has often taken center stage. The aim of this paper is to briefly explore some influential views concerning linguistic meaning. The final objective will be to demonstrate some alternatives which are open to theory with respect to this notionfor there are those who have wanted to ban talk of meaning from serious scientific discourse. 2 The point is that many of the disadvantages of traditional notions of meaning are avoidablein particular, they are avoidable along a path which starts from Frege and moves on via Tarski and Davidson. 1. Frege’s Argument from Identity Frege’s paper, “On Sense and Reference,” 3 opens with two puzzles concerning identity. First he asks whether identity is a relation between objects or a relation between signs of objects. In his earlier work Frege had held that a sentence such as ‘a=b’ expresses a relation between the two signs ‘a’ and ‘b’. Now he rejects that view. If ‘a=b’ expressed a relation between the two signs ‘a’ and ‘b’, then it could only mean that these two signs name the same object. This cannot be the correct analysis, Frege argues, because the fact that ‘a’ and ‘b’ name the same object is the result of purely arbitrary conven- tionsa result of mere stipulation. This point demonstrates the error of the analysis, Frege holds, 1. This paper originated as Chapter Four of my 2008 book, Meaning without Analyticity (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 49-72. The background of the paper is the second chapter of my Context for Meaning and Analysis 1993 (Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi). The themes are up-dated and expanded in light of more recent contributions. 2. Quine, W.V. 1960, Word and Object (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), p. 206, wrote, regarding the prospect of meanings as identical propositions that “The very question of conditions for identity of propositions presents not so much an unsolved problem as a mistaken ideal.” 3. Frege, Gottlob 1892, “Über Sinn und Bedeutung,” translated as “On Sense and Reference,” in Geach, Peter and Max Black, eds. 1980, Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, third ed. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell), pp. 56-78.