Putnam’s Doctrine of Natural Kind Words and Frege’s Doctrines of Sense, Reference and Extension: Can they Cohere?

Abstract

1. Hilary Putnam has been apt to emphasize all the differences between the deictic doctrine that he advocates for the understanding of our understanding of natural kind substantives and the accounts of the meanings of these expressions that would have had to be offered by his predecessors in the philosophy of meaning. Delighting in iconoclasm, he has sought at various times to include within the ambit of his entertaining criticisms of his predecessors such figures as Aristotle, the Scholastics, Locke, Mill, Frege, linguistic philosophers, analytical philosophers, philosophers of linguistics, indeed practically everyone.1 Frege would not have enjoyed the idea that he might be thought to belong in such a list.