Frege's Theory of Predication: An Elaboration and Defense, with Some New Applications

account of the relation between propositions and predicates. Even among those who agree that this account embodies an insight, debate continues over its elaboration. Thus we find Dummettl maintaining that the account needs to distinguish between simple and complex predicates, but Geach stigmatizing that very distinction as bringing Frege's insight into ruinous confusion (1975, 150). Interesting and important as such debates are, though, they may have occluded the relevance of the insight to topics that are removed from its original and by now familiar field of application within the theory of quantification. In the belief, indeed, that Frege's theory of predication has depths that commentators have scarcely begun to plumb, I want in this paper to develop it in the face of certain basic objections (section 1) and to use what results to elucidate the notion of sameness of sense as between predicates (section 2). This will lead (in sections 3 and 4) to novel semantical theories for certain kinds of attribution, in particular, for attributions of intention. I will show in turn (in sections 5 and 6) how my account of these attributions bears upon a dispute between Geach and Evans over the nature of reflexive pronouns, and will conclude by explaining (in section 7) how these results cast light upon the key argument in Anscombe's still troublesome article The First Person.