Names: Sense, Epistemic Content, and Denotation

My suggestion in the paper is that to know the sense of a name n is not to know some facts about the bearer of the name: it is to know a classification criterion of cognitive states. This criterion is not variable, and not contextual: it is ideally the same for every time and context, and its difference from the sense of every other name rests ultimately upon the syntactical identity of the name. This does not mean that we don’t attach information to names: we do attach it, but it is more properly qualified as the epistemic content we associate to them; epistemic content varies with the empirical situations in which a subject is involved, with his temporal and spatial location, with what he believes or knows, and so on; it accounts for what is variable and contextual to a speaker’s knowledge of his own language, and just for this reason it cannot be what we must know in order to understand the name.