Given this notion of content...

Given this notion of content, it will be possible to construe the possibility of content-bearing judgments as demonstrating the existence of the objects to which their terms refer. But this conclusion will itself, Frege claims, depend on our considering the contents of sentences as logically prior to the meanings of their individual terms.

Beginning with sentence-level contents, we are to identify their real “logical components,” components which may not correspond to anything identifiable as the meanings of the sentence’s constituent words. It will be these true components of the judgment, rather than the mental accompaniments of individual words, that determine the actual existential commitments of the…