Multiplying Senses

My aim is to motivate and develop a view of what senses are. Senses, as I conceive of them, avoid a number of the problems that plague a broadly Fregean approach to the semantics of belief ascriptions, as I hope to show. The chief innovation of my view that enables these solutions is that beliefs are taken to have multiple, truth-conditionally equivalent contents. In traditional Fregean terminology, a belief does not involve a relation to a single thought, but to many thoughts, some of which are very fine-grained, and some of which are rather coarse-grained. Each thought is a structured entity ultimately composed of unstructured senses that themselves vary in their level of grain. It is no part of my attempted vindication of senses that senses are closely related to the meanings of words, phrases, and sentences; this feature of historical Fregeanism I disavow. I endorse rather the equally traditional claim that senses are concepts or, if truth-evaluable, the propositional contents of belief. I will spend some time motivating my view by comparing it to a popular alternative view of the semantics of belief ascriptions: the hidden indexical view. In particular, I will outline how my view preserves the advantages of the hidden indexical view while retaining the natural idea that belief ascriptions are two-place relational statements. I will then answer perhaps the most crucial question for any Fregean account: what is a sense? This answer leads to an explanation of how a single belief is a relation to many truth-evaluable senses (i. e., A single belief in the psychological sense; see p. 14 for what I mean by the psychological, as opposed to metaphysical, sense of ‘belief’.