Heidegger, Tugendhat, Davidson - University of New Mexico

antinomy, but it leads, as Carnap notes, to a kind of infinite proliferation of entities. In particular, if a
particular sentence is used obliquely, its sense is thereby named; but the name must be conceived as
different from the sentence in its usual use (which, instead, names a truth-value). This name then has a
further sense, which itself must have a further name, and so forth. The treatment of senses as possible
objects of reference, which Frege introduces to attempt to deal with the special problems of indirect
discourse, thus necessarily introduces an infinite series of names and special objects for each sentence
that can appear embedded in such discourse.
As an alternative, Carnap develops a “method of extension and intension” on which intensions are
defined by the semantic rules laid down in advance for “the use of corresponding expressions in
language systems to be constructed” (p. 8) and substitution of co-referring terms is not generally
permitted into intensional contexts (pp. 142-144). Carnap observes that any picture committed to
treating linguistic expressions generally as names (or as always having referents, in Frege’s terminology)
will lead to the antinomy of the name relation and invite, by invoking senses (or intensions) themselves
which must be nameable, something like the infinite proliferation of names and entities that Frege’s
picture involves. What Carnap does not point out is that his own method of extension and intension,
while prohibiting the substitution of coreferring terms in intensional contexts internal to a language,
nevertheless leads to a formally similar problem on the level of the determination of a language itself.
For Carnap, the rules which determine the analytic truths (or L-truths) of a language and its logical
equivalences (or L-equivalences) are to be stipulated in advance in such a way as to explicate the preexisting
notion of necessity or analyticity (p. 8).
To begin with, it is not clear that actually solves the problem which Frege’s invocation of the
sense/reference distinction was originally meant to answer, since Carnap does permit the substitution of
L-equivalent expressions in all (intensional as well as extensional) contexts. If, for instance, the axioms
of geometry are considered to be among the semantic rules definitive of the linguistic system, then
Carnap’s system will allow “X believes the triangular figure is equilateral” to be substituted with “X
believes the triangular figure is equiangular,” and the informativeness of the identity judgment “an
equilateral triangle is equiangular” is not explained. 51 More generally, if the semantic rules determining
L-truth and L-equivalence are themselves conceived as explicating pre-existing determinations of
analyticity and logical equivalence in a natural language, the question arises: on what basis can these
pre-existing determinations themselves be justified? The stipulation of semantic rules explicative of
analyticity in a natural language as spoken would thus seem to presuppose a further explicit stipulation
of the rules already constitutive of the natural language in question. But it is impossible to suppose that
this stipulation of rules could take place, unless the rules in question were already in place. The
argument is made explicitly by Quine in “Truth by convention,” and formulated somewhat differently in
the classic “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”. It appears to affect any picture on which the intensional
structure of a language is considered capable of being wholly and uniquely described from outside that
language itself, whether the object of description is understood as a corpus of explicitly stated rules,
conventions of usage, or even just regularities implicit in practice. The aporia that results is, in the
context of the present discussion, a direct consequence of treating the intensional structure of a
51 Ref. the article that says this
50