Frege's Puzzle from a Model-Based Point of View

Abstract

Every utterance comes from the world model of the speaker. More generally, every sentence comes from some kind of world model. It may be the world model of a (real or imagined) person, the world model represented in a novel, movie, scientific book, virtual reality, etc. In principle, even smaller informational units (stories, poems, newspaper articles, jokes, mathematical proofs, video clips, dreams, hallucinations, etc.) may introduce their own “partial world models” as small additions to “bigger” world models (regarded as background knowledge). Sometimes, sentences contain references to other world models. Trying to understand such sentences, we should identify, and keep separated, the world models involved.