Intentionality in philosophy of language

The article providesa general outline of the problem of substitutivity of coreferential names in propositional attitudesreports. In the first part of the paper the important semantic principles we should take into accountdealing with this problem are explained. I discuss the direct reference principle and consider that themain motivation for its acceptance is the observation that names do not carry any information abouttheir object semantically, and different people can associate different descriptions with the same name,what makes their role in compositional semantics vague. In a discussion of the disquotational principleI am trying to show that even if we have good reasons to reject the in its strong formulation, its veryunfavorable for a philosopher to reject it in a weak formulation. Subsequently I proceed with criticizingthe idea that belief sentences are the exact description of beliefs or that they are reports about thespecific relation the believer stands to the entity called «proposition». I provide a case (using «saidthat» instead of «believes that») when the report is correct even though the initial content was de dictoand the reported one was de re (or de dicto but using description the first speaker couldn't accept). Themode of the sentence is not fixed by the person whose belief is reported, but by the one making thisreport - based on the context she is in.In the conclusion it is stated that even if we weaken the disquotational principle and the specificationassumption we still would not be able to get a full answer to the problem. Therefore we shouldput some constrains on the theory of meaning of names: it should explain what kind of different informationtwo different names of the same object can carry semantically without presupposing Frege'ssenses. The author points at some (metalinguistic) theories complying with those constrains.

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