Abstract

This paper deals with the question of how one could understand the difference between Frege's notion of thought and Russell's notion of proposition. After briefly discussing how one could make sense of Russell's so-called Gray's elegy argument and its relevance to Frege's notion of indirect sense, I will introduce Kaplan's solution to Russell's argument, and try to explain its significance by appealing to a puzzle raised by Kaplan in connection to his notion of valuated sentence. At the end of the paper, I will claim that the most striking feature of Russell's singular propositions as compared with Frege's thoughts is not that they may contain concrete things, but that they are not meant as representations to begin with.