The article examines some ideas of Katz's semantics (by which I mean his theory of sense together with his theory of reference). What makes this semantic theory especially interesting is the fact that it provides a reply to some skeptical arguments put forward by the late Wittgenstein, Kripke, and Quine. The main novelty of Katz's semantics is that he refuses one of the most fundamental claims of Fregean semantics, namely, the claim that the sense of a linguistic expression determines its referent (by referent I mean, in particular, the denotation of a singular term and the extension of a general term). Katz offers an alternative view on the relation between sense and referent (he calls this relation "mediation"). According to him, the sense of an expression E can be a false or incomplete description of the referent of a token of E; and the sense of E can also be an incomplete description of the referent of E's type. In the case of incomplete description, what determines the type referent is sense together with some additional information that Katz calls "real definition". So real definitions contribute also to determining truth values and modal character of sentences. Cohen puts forward some objections to this view. In particular, he adduces a counter-example to Katz's notion of the semantic role of real definitions. In the article, I show that Cohen's objections, though correct, are not fatal for Katz's theory. In my view, Katz's semantics can be modified so that it becomes immune to arguments such as those by Cohen. In particular, I suggest the following modifications: (1) excluding cases where sense is (putatively) a false description of reference from semantics: cases of this type have a more natural pragmatic explanation; (2) relativizing real definitions to contexts; (3) putting a constraint on the relation between sense and real definition. The constraint is to the effect that if the sense of an expression E is part of the sense of an expression D, then E's real definition should be part of D's real definition.
