The Unsatisfactoriness of Unsaturatedness

Frege proposed his doctrine of unsaturatedness as a solution to the problems of the unity of the proposition and the unity of the sentence. I explain the traditional solution to the problem of the unity of the sentence, as expounded by Mill, which invokes a syncategorematic sign of predication and the connotation and denotation of terms. I streamline this solution and bring it up to date. I contrast this conventionalist theory with Frege’s unsaturatedness theory. I show that Frege’s theory is mystical, ad hoc, ineffective and paradoxical, and that it entails that singular terms cannot be predicates. I argue that the conventionalist account is free of these defects and that it provides a clear and intelligible solution to the problem of the unity of the sentence. I suggest that the problem of the unity of the proposition is spurious. I recommend that the notion of unsaturatedness be extruded from