Semantic Innocence Recovered

Although the details of Frege’s account of propositional attitudes are now generally taken to be in need of some amendment, most contemporary philosophers are quite willing to accept his claim that sentences in ‘that’-clauses refer, not a truth-value, but to different abstract entities, namely thoughts. What is now in dispute, mainly as a result of the wide acceptance of the doctrine of direct reference, is the nature of thoughts (propositions). Recanati’s Oratio Recta, Oratio Obliqua stands as an exception against this backdrop. Of the standard view he accepts one tenet, that modes of presentation are somehow involved in the attitudes, and rejects the other, that belief (as well as any other attitude) is a relation to some proposition or other. I claim that, even supposing that all misgiving concerning modes of presentation can be put to rest, by renouncing propositions as being the referents of ‘that’-clauses and the objects of propositional attitudes, we still have not recovered our pre-Fregean semantic innocence.