Christan asked:

How should I approach this question taken from an undergraduate paper?

'Can a proper name have a Fregean sense but lack a Millian connotation?

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In his System of LogicMill distinguishes between the denotation and the connotation of a term. If the
term is a general term, the denotation is the class of things to which the term applies, like 'all horses'
or 'all planets'. Its connotation is its descriptive meaning, i.e. the information that would be deduced
by a competent speaker from the fact that something is a 'horse' or a 'planet'. If the term is a name, its
denotation is the bearer of the name. But what about it's connotation? Mill claimed that proper names
do not have a connotation. Take my name, for example. I am told that 'Geoffrey' originally came from
the Latin for 'bringer of peace'. However, it does not follow from the fact that my name is Geoffrey that
I am a bringer of peace. A competent speaker could not deduce anything about me from the fact that
my name is Geoffrey.

In his paper 'On Sense and Reference', Frege argued that both singular terms and general terms
have both a sense and a reference. The sense of a term is the 'mode of presentation' of the
reference, or, as some commentators have explained it, the 'route to reference'. Frege's idea is that
there can never be such a thing as simply 'knowing' the reference of a term. You know it in a
particular way, or from a particular standpoint. To take Frege's example, the planet Venus is known
as 'the Morning Star' and also as 'the Evening Star'. At one time, people did not know that the
Morning Star is the Evening Star. They did not know that these were two 'modes' in which one and
the same heavenly body was 'presented' to them.

For general terms, Frege's 'sense' seems pretty much like Mill's 'connotation'. The same holds for
descriptive singular terms such as, 'The Prime Minister' or 'the car parked outside my window'. With
proper names it's a different story.

There has been much controversy in recent philosophy of language over the question whether proper
names have a Fregean sense. In what follows, I am voicing my own opinions:

Mill did not address himself to the question how a proper name 'gets' its denotation, or what it is for a
competent speaker to know that a proper name has the denotation that it has. Frege saw a problem
here which Mill did not see. In giving examples of the 'senses' of names, however, Frege always
gives descriptions. The trouble is, that whatever you or I know in grasping the correct use of a proper
name cannot be analysed in terms of any specific set of descriptions. So it begins to look rather
problematic whether there is any such thing as 'the' mode of presentation of the reference which
belongs to any given name. The names 'Hesperus' for the Evening Star and 'Phosphorus' for the
Morning Star are pretty rare exceptions. Usually what happens is that a name gains currency, and
people get to know about its bearer in lots of different ways.

For Frege's theory to be true, there has to be a standard or canonical way in which a fully competent
speaker is presented with the reference of the name. After that, the name gets passed around and
lots of people get to hear about the person or thing named even though they are ignorant of its
canonical 'route to reference'. Gareth Evans explores this theory in his book The Varieties of
Reference.

But I remain sceptical. I accept that there is a story to be told in each case that explains how a given
name has the use and the currency that it has. But I don't see that this information could ever be
encapsulated into a neat theory of the 'sense' of proper names.

Geoffrey Klempner