Howard Wettstein argues in his "Has Sem-antics Rested on a Mistake," ("Journal of Philosophy," April 1986) that semantical theories which take demonstratives and names to contribute individuals to the propositions the statements containing them express, cannot resolve Frege's problems about cognitive significance and identity. Wettstein himself is a "new theorist of reference," and advocates this type of treatment of names and demon-stratives. He concludes that it was a mistake for semantics to try to resolve Frege's problems.
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I argue that semanticists should worry about cognitive significance, and that semantical theories of the sort in question can resolve Frege's problems. I argue that as soon as one accepts that reference depends on circumstances of utterance and not just the meaning of the words used, one should accept the consequence that the cognitive significance of an utterance--what one believes when one believes the utterance to be true--cannot be identified with the proposition expressed by the ut-terance. Once one accepts this, it is pos-sible to resolve Frege's problems, without abandoning the new theory of reference.
