Linguistic Semantics, Philosophical Semantics and Pragmatics

One way of doing semantics is to associate with the sentences of a language abstract objects, such as meanings, propositions, functions, thoughts and possible worlds. Sentences are assigned semantic properties by virtue of the properties of the associated abstract objects. I distinguish two theories in this tradition, the first of which, represented by Frege, concentrates on the cognitive content expressed by a sentence; the second, represented by J. J. Katz, concentrates on the meaning of sentences. I argue that the facts for which the first theory is supposed to give an account cannot be explained by a theory of the second sort. I argue further that the cognitive content of a sentence can be identified with meaning of the sentence or the meaning of any other sentence. And finally, I advance the hypothesis that one role for a pragmatic theory is to provide the principles by virtue of which speakers can determine the cognitive content expressed by a sentence in a context of utterance given the meaning of the sentence.