Could Frege’s sense-reference distinction be put to work? I think not.
Top o’ the Stack.
I made the point a while back that the vocabularies of phenomenology and neuroscience are radically disparate, such that nonsense arises when one says things like, ‘This burnt garlic smell is identical to a brain state of mine.’ To which a Vietnam veteran, altering the example, replied by e-mail:
. . . when a neuroscientist says your smelling this odor as napalm is nothing but a complex neural event activating several regions of the brain…, he isn’t claiming you can replace your talk about smells with talk about neural signals from the olfactory bulb. Different ways of talking have evolved for different purposes. But he is saying that beneath these different ways of talking & thinking there is just one underlying reality, namely, neural events in our brain.
The idea, then, that is that are are different ways of referring to the same underlying reality. And so if we deploy a simple distinction between sense and reference we can uphold the materialist/physicalist reduction of qualia to brain states. Well, I doubt it. In fact, I deny it.