Meta Ontology

The author resolves a conflict between Frege's view that thecognitive significance of coreferential names may be distinct andKaplan's view that since coreferential names have the same"character", they have the same cognitive significance. A distinctionis drawn between an expression's "character" and its "cognitivecharacter". The former yields the denotation of an expressionrelative to a context (and individual); the latter yields the abstractsense of an expression relative to a context (and individual). Thoughcoreferential names have the same character, they may have distinctcognitive characters. Propositions involving these abstract sensesplay an important role in explaining de dicto belief contexts.