Language, Action and Thought

In principle, it is a quite undisputable fact that Frege’s pragmatics, understood as a theory of communication, responds to the conception generally dubbed the “code” or “message” model, according to which successful communication requires the identity between the thought expressed by the speaker in uttering a sentence and the thought grasped by the hearer. It is also a quite undisputable fact, in principle, that indexicals and demonstratives pose singular problems for his theory of meaning as sense and reference; problems that philosophers of language and mind have been trying to solve by proposing various Fregean, neo-Fregean, or directly non-Fregean accounts. The aim of this work is to discuss the specific problems that indexicals and demonstratives pose to Frege’s theory of communication, and to sketch an alternative that faces these problems and, as a first step, jettisons the main assumptions of the code model. We suggest that abandoning the code model might actually be the truly Fregean move.