Sense And Reference Essay Research Paper April

Sense And Reference Essay, Research Paper

April Chlumsky

Philosophy

3/4/00

Frege on Sense and Reference

Gottlob Frege developed the theory of sense and reference into a thorough philosophy of language. He assigned logic the task of discovering the laws of truth, not of assertion or thought. The work .On Sense and Reference. has received a great deal of attention throughout the years. Indeed, the work .On Sense and Reference. by Frege, is one of his most read and most refuted works.

In Frege.s best-known work .On Sense and Reference. .two-thirds of the text is concerned with explaining how the distinction between .sinn. and .bedeutung. (sense and reference) applies to sentences. After it has been argued that the reference of a sentence is a truth-value, the remainder of the essay tries to show how apparent counter-examples to the claim can be accounted for..1 Frege makes progress in this doctrine by assigning thoughts to a different semantic level than that of truth-values. He also shows that .the paradigm of reference seems to be the relation between a name and what it names..1 After this he becomes occupied with his discussion of proper names ( the reference of the sentence) and definite descriptions (the sense of the sentence) then moves on to the second part of his essay. Here he raises questions about declarative sentences. These questions seem to be unrelated to his explanation of .sense and reference. up to this point. The rest of the essay is his examination of what sense and reference for sentences is.

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In his ontology, Frege asserted the existence of two special objects, namely, the truth-values .true. and .false. and defined concepts as a special kind of function, namely any function that connected objects to truth values. .To Frege .a sentence stands for or designates a truth-value, it expresses a thought. The truth-value is the reference of the sentence; the thought expressed is its sense. The truth-value fulfills one role of judgeable-content: it is the value of concepts (functions)..2 Rules of asserting, thinking, judging, and inferring follow from the laws of truth. The truth-value is tied to assertions.

To Frege, thoughts are what are judged, asserted, or entertained. They are either true or false and stand in contrast to ideas. .Thoughts are existence- and identity-independent of a bearer (thinker)..2 Thoughts are also public and can be shared with others, and are also held in reality. The only sentences that can express a complete thought are declarative sentences. Yet Frege points out that non-declarative sentences can have meaning. For example .Help! I am trapped. expresses an idea that has meaning.

This moves us to what ideas are. Ideas cannot be seen or touched as they are private. They are that which helps us in our denotation of sentences. Frege believes that ideas (sense) are had. One has sensations, feelings, moods, inclinations, and wishes. An idea, which someone has, belongs to the content of his consciousness. Ideas need a

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bearer and every idea has only one bearer..3 Qualities are examples of ideas. For example red or bitter are ideas.

The difference between thoughts and ideas is that thoughts are of objects, which can be touched and seen. They are not only inside of the mind. He suggests that every word in a sentence has a name, but he recognizes that .names without content (that do not .stand for anything.) may nevertheless contribute to the judgeable-content expressed. They have sense, but lack reference..4 The thoughts are what truth claims are made out of not ideas. Also, a thought cannot be an idea according to Frege. For, you have to have a thought in-order to have language. You cannot have language with thoughts alone.

Sense is that which .distinguishes from tone or coloring.4 in a sentence. Substituting .I. in-place-of .Mr. Jones. may affect the coloring of the sentence, but the thought will remain the same. The listener will only conceive a different mental image of what is being expressed. An example of this may be the following:

Mr. Jones may utter the statement, .I went to the party..

Mr. Smith says of Jones, .Mr. Jones went to the party..

A different sense is expressed when Mr. Jones tells people that he went to a party than if Mr. Smith tells others about Mr. Jones going to a party. When someone hears .I went to the party. they automatically have an idea of what .I. is. However, if they hear .Mr.

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Jones went to the party. they might have an image of a man that lives in a blue house on Bliss Street. The sense is therefore different even-though the reference, Mr. Jones, remains the same.

.The sense of a proper name determines what the reference is, if there is one. The sense of, for example, .the teacher of Alexander the Great. belongs to Aristotle, who is thus the name.s reference, determined by the sense..5

Michael Dummett, in his book Frege and Other Philosophers, proposes that .Frege should be understood as holding that the reference of an expression can be stated, but its sense cannot. Rather, he suggests that we show what its sense is or is to be by the particular way (out of a number of possible non-equivalent ways) in which we say what its reference is or is not to be..6 Yet Frege still gives importance to the reference. The .dictum. o

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