The
mediated reference theory is a
semanticSemantics is the study of meaning. It focuses on the relation between signifiers, such as words, phrases, signs and symbols, and what they stand for, their denotata....
theory that posits that words refer to something in the external world, but insists that there is more to the meaning of a name than simply the object to which it refers. It thus stands opposed to the theory of direct reference. Its most famous advocate is the mathematician and philosopher
Gottlob FregeFriedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is considered to be one of the founders of modern logic, and made major contributions to the foundations of mathematics. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy, for his writings on...
. The view was very widely held in the middle of the twentieth century by such philosophers as Sir Peter Strawson and
John SearleJohn Rogers Searle is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.-Biography:...
.
Frege argued that the semantics of words and expressions should be divided into two elements: a
sense, which is a "mode of presentation" of the reference of the name; and the reference itself, which is the object to which the name refers. And crucially, for Frege, names that refer to the same object can have different senses. (The difference in "cognitive significance" of 'a = a', and 'a = b', where 'a' and 'b' refer to
the same object, has been called
Frege's problem or puzzleFrege's Puzzle is a puzzle about the semantics of proper names, although the title is also sometimes applied to a related puzzle about indexicals...
. Frege introduces the concept of
Sinn, or sense, to explain the difference.) For example, "the morning star" and "the evening star" both refer to the object Venus, but they present it to us in different ways: the former as the brightest celestial body visible in the morning, the latter as the brightest celestial body visible in the evening. And so it is, says Frege, that the statement that the morning star is the evening star is potentially informative: its meaning is not just that some object is the same as itself, but (roughly) that the brightest celestial body visible in the morning is the same object as the brightest celestial body visible in the evening.
It is because Frege uses
definite descriptionA definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun. The definite description is proper if X applies to a unique individual or object. For example: "the first person in space" and "the 42nd President of the United States of...
s in many of his examples that he is often taken to have endorsed the
descriptivist theory of namesDescriptivist theory of names is a view of the nature of the meaning and reference of proper names generally attributed to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell...
, an attribution made by
Saul KripkeSaul Aaron Kripke is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center...
. Most scholars of Frege's work now agree, however, that the attribution is mistaken. If so, then it is important to distinguish the mediated reference theory from the description theory of names.
Bertrand Russell
A paradigm example of an indirect theory of reference is that of philosopher
Bertrand RussellBertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these things...
. In his direct reference theory, Russell first distinguished between a "logical subject" and a "grammatical subject." The former is the thing in the real world - the
referentReference is derived from Middle English referren, from Middle French rèférer, from Latin referre, "to carry back", formed from the prefix re- and ferre, "to bear"...
; while the latter is a description or concept. He then claimed that in logic a "feeling for reality" had to be maintained in order to save discussion from a whole host of troubles. And since the logical subject was made up only of reference, tied together in strings by propositional functions, in logic there was no meaning except reference.
Russell was also quite alive to the topic of descriptions. His particular interest was in "definite and indefinite descriptions." Definite descriptions have the form of "the such-and-such", and indefinite descriptions have the form of "a such-and-such". Russell then made a surprising argument: that "descriptions had meaning only if they were put into bigger statement(s)." This is because his method of translating sentences necessitated that they be rewritten in logical notation, and an isolated description cannot be effectively captured by any such notation.
Take the sentence, "The king of France is bald", for instance. For Russell, what it really translates as (in a reformed, better English) is:
There is at least one x such that: x and nothing else is a King of France, and x is bald.
In this newer, better form, the word "the" no longer appears; it is diffused throughout the rest of the logical translation. This, for Russell, is why the definite description "the king of France" is not meaningful on its own; the word, 'the', doesn't work unless it appears in the context of a full sentence.
Furthermore, the above can be expressed in a more strict logical form (where K(x) means "x is the king of France", B(x) means "x is bald", the bullet means "and", and the arrow means "if-then"):
Which says: "there is an x such that: x is bald and x is a king of France; and for every y that is a king of France, x is y; and every z that is a king of France is bald". This is a very long way of stating that something is both uniquely king of France and bald.
For Russell, this logical form would provide the speaker of a language with metaphysical insight as to what they are actually speaking about.
See also
- Direct reference theory
A direct reference theory is a theory of meaning that claims that the meaning of an expression lies in what it points out in the world. It stands in contrast to mediated reference theories.- John Stuart Mill :...
- Sense and reference
Sinn and bedeutung are usually translated, respectively, as sense and reference. Two different aspects of some terms' meanings, a term's reference is the object that the term refers to, while the term's sense is the way that the term refers to that object.Sinn and bedeutung were introduced by...
- Descriptivist theory of names
Descriptivist theory of names is a view of the nature of the meaning and reference of proper names generally attributed to Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell...