Indexicals and Intensionality: A Fregean Perspective

* This paper began in an attempt to meet Christopher Peacocke's objections to an ancestor of its third section. I have been helped by comments on the first draft by Michael Gehman and Timothy Williamson. Improvements in subsequent drafts were prompted by discussion with David Kaplan, Terence Parsons, Mark Richard and Nathan Salmon and by comments from a referee for The Philosophical Review. The manuscript was prepared using the OPHIR font for the Macintosh computer, written by B. L. Tapscott of the University of Utah. My research was supported by a grant from the Committee on Research of Tulane University, for which I record my sincere appreciation. 'David Kaplan, "Quantifying in," Words and Objections: Essays on the Work of W. V. Quine, D. Davidson and J. Hintikka, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1969), pp. 206-242, at p. 213. 2Though the headquote from Kaplan is apposite, I do not mean to second his idea that senses 'mediate between' thinkers and objects of thought, as some have supposed sense-data do between perceivers and objects of perception. Examples of recent Fregean work free of such an implication are Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), and Christopher Peacocke, Sense and Content (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Both authors subscribe to what might roughly be labelled an "evidential" conception of Fregean sense: whether or not a subject is employing a demonstrative or indexical mode of presentation of a particular type in a thought