Modes of Representation Content, Communication, and Frege

Lois Lane knows that Superman can fly, but she does not know that Clark Kent can fly. How can that be, given that Superman and Clark are one and the same? To answer this question, Frege famously distinguished the reference of a name (the thing it is a name of) from what he called its 'sense' or 'mode of presentation'. The sense was meant to capture our (necessarily limited) perspective on reference and to explain the difference in 'cognitive value' between "Superman can fly" and "Clark can fly". Frege's distinction has been widely discussed in the last century, but much about it remains unclear. In this collection, Richard Kimberly Heck, one of the world's foremost experts on Frege's philosophy, distinguishes three aspects of Frege's famous 'puzzle' and explores the connections between them. Their wide-ranging discussion touches on issues in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, the history of analytic philosophy, and meta-philosophy. Heck argues that, while many of the details of Frege's position cannot be defended, his famous puzzle still has much to teach us both about the foundations of cognition and about the nature of linguistic communication. Modes of Presentation presents eight previously published papers, two of which are significantly expanded. There are also three new chapters, three new postscripts responding to criticisms, and a substantial overview that introduces the issues and traces connections between the chapters.

Richard Kimberly Heck, Brown University

Richard Kimberly Heck is Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Linguistics at Brown University. They received a BPhil from Oxford in 1987 and their PhD from MIT in 1991. Heck is perhaps best known for their work on Gottlob Frege's philosophy of logic and mathematics, having written two books on that topic: Frege's Theorem and Reading Frege's Grundgesetze (both OUP). Heck has also worked extensively on philosophy of language, philosophy of logic, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of mind. Most recently, they have been working on a range of issues concerning gender and sexuality.