Sentence Schemes: A Fregean Approach to Language Analysis

Abstract

Sentence schemes provide a general tool for the philosophical analysis of natural language. Sentence schemes distinguish between linguistic expressions, what they express, and what they refer to, and provide general characterizations thereof not only for the main categories of linguistic expressions: names, predicates, quantifiers, modal words, and sentences, etc., but also for the distinctions between different levels that the sentences with these expressions have. The paper sets up a general frame work of sentence schemes and illustrates their philosophical significance by analyzing Frege’ and Kripke's theories of names and the Gettier problem.