Sense and reference
Encyclopedia
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 German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege
in his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On sense and reference"). Frege applied bedeutung mainly to proper names and, in lesser extent, to sentences.
Though the distinction resides in philosophy of language
, it enters philosophy's other areas, including philosophy of mind
, metaphysics
, and metaethics.
, according to which a proper name
has no meaning above and beyond the object to which it refers (its referent or reference). That is, the word "Aristotle" just means Aristotle, that person, and no more. It does not mean "The writer of De Anima." Hence, the sentence Aristotle was Greek says only that that person was Greek. It does not say that the writer of De Anima was Greek. That is, it permits that Aristotle might not have written De Anima. More generally, for any given proposition about Aristotle, one can use the name without believing that proposition to be true of Aristotle.
Frege's central objection to the view that a name's meaning is no more than its referent is that, if a and b are names of the same object
, then the identity
statement a = b must mean the same as a = a. Yet clearly the first can convey information in a way that the second cannot; that Samuel Clemens is Samuel Clemens is just trivial, but that Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain
is interesting. Why? Or, why is Cicero is Tully more significant than Cicero is Cicero? And, by the same token, Samuel Clemens wrote novels and Mark Twain wrote novels would have to mean the same thing but, again, the two sentences seem to convey different information.
Frege's distinction is meant to make sense of these phenomena. He postulates that, in addition to a reference (Bedeutung), a proper name possesses what he calls a sense (Sinn), some aspect of the way its reference is thought of that can differ, even between two names that refer to the same object. The important difference between Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example, is a "difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated". The sense of an expression is "that wherein the mode of presentation is contained". Thus, one can know both the names Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens without realizing that they are about the same object, because they present that object in different ways, that is, they have different senses.
Another demonstrative example for this is the following:
"The Leader of the Labour Party in October, 2006" and "the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in October, 2006". These two linguistic expressions differ in sense, but they do have the same referent, that is Tony Blair.
Summarizing:
Frege uses the following example to illustrate this view. Let a, b, and c be three lines
, each of which joins one vertex of a triangle
to the midpoint
of the opposite side (each of a, b and c is thus a median
). Then it is a theorem that
At one time, it was common to identify the sense of a name with an identifying description, which would put Frege's view close to the later Russell
's description theory of names. For example, the name "Mark Twain" might just mean: The man who wrote Tom Sawyer, and Samuel Clemens might mean: The eldest son of John and Jane Clemens. Thus the reference would be determined as whatever fit the description. This interpretation is now almost unanimously rejected by scholars. Unfortunately, however, a detailed replacement has not been forthcoming. But what is clear is that Frege certainly did not mean that the sense of a name is merely a collection of ideas a particular user of a name happens to associate with it: Because they figure into the meanings of terms in a public language and can be communicated, senses must be objective
.
What this article has called sense and reference are what Frege calls Sinn and Bedeutung, respectively, in the original German. Sometimes the pair of terms is translated as sense and meaning or as sense and nominatum. The precise meaning of these terms can vary quite significantly from writer to writer, so some caution is due.
For Sinn, writers have used the terms sense
, meaning, intension
, connotation
, case
, and content.
For Bedeutung, writers have used the terms reference
, referent, meaning, extension
, denotation
, nominatum, and designatum.
Note that (confusingly) each expression has been translated as meaning by someone.
Frege is typically translated as saying that an expression "expresses its sense" and "stands for or designates its reference". Yet earlier in the essay he offers another verb, refers, writing of "that to which the sign refers, which may be called the reference of the sign". Since then writers have variously said that an expression stands for, designates, refers to, or denotes its reference. We can also say that an expression picks out its reference, or (alternatively) that the sense of an expression is what picks out its reference.
". Since there is not a greatest integer, the expression doesn't refer to anything. But it seems perfectly meaningful, since we seem to understand claims like "The greatest integer is larger than one million". Employing the sense-reference distinction, we can say that the expression has a sense but lacks a reference.
Although the term "the greatest integer" has no reference in the conventional arithmetic, in the ultra-intuitionistic arithmetic suggested by Alexander Esenin-Volpin
(1960), it has a reference because one of the axioms of this arithmetic is that there is "the greatest integer." So, in one universe, an expression can have sense without reference, while in another universe, the same expression can have both sense and reference.
Another example is Odysseus. Since he is a fictional character, the name Odysseus does not appear to mean anyone at all; yet sentences like "Odysseus was set down on the beach at Ithaca" are meaningful, in that they can be true or false. If a sentence's meaning is a function of the meanings of its parts, then parts of the sentence, such as Odysseus, seemingly do have meaning.
Whether this solution works, and whether it was even seriously intended by Frege, is disputed. In order for it to work, it must be possible for a term to have a sense without a reference, and this requires that sense cannot be defined simply as the mode of presentation of the reference, since sometimes there is no reference being presented. Thus the view that the sense-reference distinction solves the problem of empty names encourages the view that a sense is an individuating description (which could be understood with or without a reference satisfying it). This makes a sense equivalent to a Russellian description (see below), and makes Frege's position "descriptivist", leaving it prey to a number of difficulties raised against that view. Other philosophers have argued that Frege is not a descriptivist, and hence that the sense-reference distinction does not solve the problem of fictional names. Proponents of this view often claim that sentences using empty names do not in fact express propositions, hence are not literally meaningful, despite appearances. They face the difficulty of explaining the apparent meaningfulness of sentences using the word Odysseus. On one view, fictional names merely pretend to express propositions. Our understanding of sentences about Odysseus consists then in our "playing along" (see Gareth Evans
, Saul Kripke
).
s, or sets, of objects and concepts.
For Russell, sense is wholly semantic. Reference by contrast is intimately connected with the named object. Mont Blanc is the referent of the name "Mont Blanc." Frege argues that the thought "Mont Blanc 'with its snowfields'" cannot be a component of the thought that "Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 meters high". If the same expression "Mont Blanc" is in both sentences then there is something common to each thought, and therefore something corresponding to the name "Mont Blanc." This common element, which cannot be the referent, must be the meaning or "sense."
that most of the apparent proper names in English are in fact "disguised definite description
s". So "Aristotle" is understood as "The pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander", or by some other unique description. Although Russell explicitly rejected Frege's notion of sense, he rejected it just for proper names. But Russell also held the view (not evident in the Mont Blanc example) that most of the "proper names" in English are not names at all, but descriptions in disguise. Possibly the only real proper names were demonstrative pronouns like this and that (directed at an object that can be immediately perceived). So in fact if Frege's view was "descriptivist", then he effectively agrees with Russell on most of the apparent "proper names" of ordinary language: Frege thinks that "Aristotle" is a name, with a sense, which is equivalent to some description. Russell thinks that Aristotle is not really a name, but is (in disguised form) just such a description.
Thus for most of the twentieth century the "Frege-Russell" descriptivist view was taken as something of an orthodoxy. In Saul Kripke
's famous Naming and Necessity
lectures, which largely turned the tide against descriptivism, he treats both Russell and Frege as opposed to Mill's view in the same way. Thus Kripke's argument that names are not equivalent to descriptions was widely construed as the view that names do not have senses; or as a rejection of the sense-reference distinction. (Tellingly, all of the three problems the distinction aimed to solve have subsequently re-emerged as important problems in the philosophy of language.)
This reading of Frege has been rejected by many scholars, most strongly by Gareth Evans
in The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell
in "The Sense and Reference of a Proper Name", following lines developed by Michael Dummett
. Dummett argues that Frege's notion of sense should not be equated with a description. Evans further developed this line, arguing that a sense without a referent was not possible. He and McDowell both take the line that Frege's discussion of empty names, and of the idea of sense without reference, are inconsistent, and that his apparent endorsement of descriptivism rests only on a small number of imprecise and perhaps offhand remarks. And both point to the power that the sense-reference distinction 'does' have (i.e., to solve at least the first two problems), even if it is not given a descriptivist reading.
'
, which predates Frege and is famously interpreted by Mill
. This distinction is applied mainly to words (particularly predicates) expressing properties
(e.g., red
, dog
, bachelor
), rather than naming individuals, so the difference between the two distinctions can be hard to see. The connotation of a predicate is the concept
it expresses, or more often, the set of properties that determine whether an individual falls under it. The denotation of a concept is the actual collection of entities that do fall under it. Thus the connotation of bachelor is perhaps "unmarried adult male human" and its denotation is all the bachelors in the world.
Under a descriptivist reading of Frege, sense and reference are probably the same as connotation and denotation.
Under a non-descriptivist reading, they are probably not. It is always possible to have a connotation without a denotation, which may not be the case with sense and reference. A given sense always determines the same reference, which might not be the case with connotation and denotation. Most clearly, a single concept—which by definition has only one connotation and denotation (at a time), might be expressed by terms having different senses. For example, cat and feline have precisely the same connotation (member of the Felidae
family of carnivorous mammals), and obviously the same denotation (all the cats; that is, all the felines), but it is perfectly intelligible that someone should fail to realize that cat and feline mean the same—perhaps they have only heard one word applied to housecats, the other to tigers and lions. In that case, the words have different senses.
Sinn and bedeutung were introduced by German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege
Gottlob Frege
Friedrich 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...
in his 1892 paper "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On sense and reference"). Frege applied bedeutung mainly to proper names and, in lesser extent, to sentences.
Though the distinction resides in philosophy of language
Philosophy of language
Philosophy of language is the reasoned inquiry into the nature, origins, and usage of language. As a topic, the philosophy of language for analytic philosophers is concerned with four central problems: the nature of meaning, language use, language cognition, and the relationship between language...
, it enters philosophy's other areas, including philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind
Philosophy of mind is a branch of philosophy that studies the nature of the mind, mental events, mental functions, mental properties, consciousness and their relationship to the physical body, particularly the brain. The mind-body problem, i.e...
, metaphysics
Metaphysics
Metaphysics is a branch of philosophy concerned with explaining the fundamental nature of being and the world, although the term is not easily defined. Traditionally, metaphysics attempts to answer two basic questions in the broadest possible terms:...
, and metaethics.
Motivation for and development of the distinction
Frege's distinction rejects a view put forward by John Stuart MillJohn Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
, according to which a proper name
Proper name
"A proper name [is] a word that answers the purpose of showing what thing it is that we are talking about" writes John Stuart Mill in A System of Logic , "but not of telling anything about it"...
has no meaning above and beyond the object to which it refers (its referent or reference). That is, the word "Aristotle" just means Aristotle, that person, and no more. It does not mean "The writer of De Anima." Hence, the sentence Aristotle was Greek says only that that person was Greek. It does not say that the writer of De Anima was Greek. That is, it permits that Aristotle might not have written De Anima. More generally, for any given proposition about Aristotle, one can use the name without believing that proposition to be true of Aristotle.
Frege's central objection to the view that a name's meaning is no more than its referent is that, if a and b are names of the same object
Object (philosophy)
An object in philosophy is a technical term often used in contrast to the term subject. Consciousness is a state of cognition that includes the subject, which can never be doubted as only it can be the one who doubts, and some object or objects that may or may not have real existence without...
, then the identity
Identity (mathematics)
In mathematics, the term identity has several different important meanings:*An identity is a relation which is tautologically true. This means that whatever the number or value may be, the answer stays the same. For example, algebraically, this occurs if an equation is satisfied for all values of...
statement a = b must mean the same as a = a. Yet clearly the first can convey information in a way that the second cannot; that Samuel Clemens is Samuel Clemens is just trivial, but that Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain
Mark Twain
Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...
is interesting. Why? Or, why is Cicero is Tully more significant than Cicero is Cicero? And, by the same token, Samuel Clemens wrote novels and Mark Twain wrote novels would have to mean the same thing but, again, the two sentences seem to convey different information.
Frege's distinction is meant to make sense of these phenomena. He postulates that, in addition to a reference (Bedeutung), a proper name possesses what he calls a sense (Sinn), some aspect of the way its reference is thought of that can differ, even between two names that refer to the same object. The important difference between Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens, for example, is a "difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated". The sense of an expression is "that wherein the mode of presentation is contained". Thus, one can know both the names Mark Twain and Samuel Clemens without realizing that they are about the same object, because they present that object in different ways, that is, they have different senses.
Another demonstrative example for this is the following:
"The Leader of the Labour Party in October, 2006" and "the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom in October, 2006". These two linguistic expressions differ in sense, but they do have the same referent, that is Tony Blair.
Summarizing:
- The reference is the object that the expression refers to. For instance, the name Mark Twain refers to Mark Twain, i.e. Samuel Clemens, the man who lived in the U.S. and wrote satires. The name Samuel Clemens also refers to that man. Hence the two have the same reference.
- The sense is the "cognitive significance" or "mode of presentation" of the referent.
- Linguistic Expressions with the same reference may have different senses.
Frege uses the following example to illustrate this view. Let a, b, and c be three lines
Line (mathematics)
The notion of line or straight line was introduced by the ancient mathematicians to represent straight objects with negligible width and depth. Lines are an idealization of such objects...
, each of which joins one vertex of a triangle
Triangle
A triangle is one of the basic shapes of geometry: a polygon with three corners or vertices and three sides or edges which are line segments. A triangle with vertices A, B, and C is denoted ....
to the midpoint
Midpoint
The midpoint is the middle point of a line segment. It is equidistant from both endpoints.-Formulas:...
of the opposite side (each of a, b and c is thus a median
Median (geometry)
In geometry, a median of a triangle is a line segment joining a vertex to the midpoint of the opposing side. Every triangle has exactly three medians; one running from each vertex to the opposite side...
). Then it is a theorem that
[t]he point of intersection of a and b is then the same as the point of intersection of b and c. So we have different designations for the same pointCentroidIn geometry, the centroid, geometric center, or barycenter of a plane figure or two-dimensional shape X is the intersection of all straight lines that divide X into two parts of equal moment about the line. Informally, it is the "average" of all points of X...
, and these names ('point of intersection of a and b', 'point of intersection of b and c') likewise indicate the mode of presentation; and hence the statement contains actual knowledge. Gottlob Frege, Über Sinn und Bedeutung
At one time, it was common to identify the sense of a name with an identifying description, which would put Frege's view close to the later Russell
Bertrand Russell
Bertrand 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...
's description theory of names. For example, the name "Mark Twain" might just mean: The man who wrote Tom Sawyer, and Samuel Clemens might mean: The eldest son of John and Jane Clemens. Thus the reference would be determined as whatever fit the description. This interpretation is now almost unanimously rejected by scholars. Unfortunately, however, a detailed replacement has not been forthcoming. But what is clear is that Frege certainly did not mean that the sense of a name is merely a collection of ideas a particular user of a name happens to associate with it: Because they figure into the meanings of terms in a public language and can be communicated, senses must be objective
Objectivity (philosophy)
Objectivity is a central philosophical concept which has been variously defined by sources. A proposition is generally considered to be objectively true when its truth conditions are met and are "mind-independent"—that is, not met by the judgment of a conscious entity or subject.- Objectivism...
.
Sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung)
Broadly speaking, the reference (or referent) of a proper name is the object it denotes or indicates. The sense of a proper name is whatever meaning it has, when there is no object to be indicated.What this article has called sense and reference are what Frege calls Sinn and Bedeutung, respectively, in the original German. Sometimes the pair of terms is translated as sense and meaning or as sense and nominatum. The precise meaning of these terms can vary quite significantly from writer to writer, so some caution is due.
For Sinn, writers have used the terms sense
Word sense
In linguistics, a word sense is one of the meanings of a word.For example a dictionary may have over 50 different meanings of the word , each of these having a different meaning based on the context of the word usage in a sentence...
, meaning, intension
Intension
In linguistics, logic, philosophy, and other fields, an intension is any property or quality connoted by a word, phrase or other symbol. In the case of a word, it is often implied by the word's definition...
, connotation
Connotation
A connotation is a commonly understood subjective cultural or emotional association that some word or phrase carries, in addition to the word's or phrase's explicit or literal meaning, which is its denotation....
, case
Case
-Academia and education:* Campaign for Science and Engineering , a non-profit organization which promotes science and engineering research in the UK* Case analysis, division of a problem into separate cases...
, and content.
For Bedeutung, writers have used the terms reference
Reference
Reference 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"...
, referent, meaning, extension
Extension (semantics)
In any of several studies that treat the use of signs - for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, and semiotics - the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of...
, denotation
Denotation
This word has distinct meanings in other fields: see denotation . For the opposite of Denotation see Connotation.*In logic, linguistics and semiotics, the denotation of a word or phrase is a part of its meaning; however, the part referred to varies by context:** In grammar and literary theory, the...
, nominatum, and designatum.
Note that (confusingly) each expression has been translated as meaning by someone.
An expression's relation to sense or reference
Terminology has also been applied to capture the relation between- an expression and its sense
- an expression and its reference
Frege is typically translated as saying that an expression "expresses its sense" and "stands for or designates its reference". Yet earlier in the essay he offers another verb, refers, writing of "that to which the sign refers, which may be called the reference of the sign". Since then writers have variously said that an expression stands for, designates, refers to, or denotes its reference. We can also say that an expression picks out its reference, or (alternatively) that the sense of an expression is what picks out its reference.
Sense without reference
One application Frege saw for the distinction concerns what are called nonreferring, nondenoting, or empty, expressions. These expressions do not have a reference, for example "the greatest integerInteger
The integers are formed by the natural numbers together with the negatives of the non-zero natural numbers .They are known as Positive and Negative Integers respectively...
". Since there is not a greatest integer, the expression doesn't refer to anything. But it seems perfectly meaningful, since we seem to understand claims like "The greatest integer is larger than one million". Employing the sense-reference distinction, we can say that the expression has a sense but lacks a reference.
Although the term "the greatest integer" has no reference in the conventional arithmetic, in the ultra-intuitionistic arithmetic suggested by Alexander Esenin-Volpin
Alexander Esenin-Volpin
Alexander Sergeyevich Esenin-Volpin is a prominent Russian-American poet and mathematician.Born on May 12, 1924 in the former Soviet Union, he was a notable dissident, political prisoner, poet, and mathematician...
(1960), it has a reference because one of the axioms of this arithmetic is that there is "the greatest integer." So, in one universe, an expression can have sense without reference, while in another universe, the same expression can have both sense and reference.
Another example is Odysseus. Since he is a fictional character, the name Odysseus does not appear to mean anyone at all; yet sentences like "Odysseus was set down on the beach at Ithaca" are meaningful, in that they can be true or false. If a sentence's meaning is a function of the meanings of its parts, then parts of the sentence, such as Odysseus, seemingly do have meaning.
Whether this solution works, and whether it was even seriously intended by Frege, is disputed. In order for it to work, it must be possible for a term to have a sense without a reference, and this requires that sense cannot be defined simply as the mode of presentation of the reference, since sometimes there is no reference being presented. Thus the view that the sense-reference distinction solves the problem of empty names encourages the view that a sense is an individuating description (which could be understood with or without a reference satisfying it). This makes a sense equivalent to a Russellian description (see below), and makes Frege's position "descriptivist", leaving it prey to a number of difficulties raised against that view. Other philosophers have argued that Frege is not a descriptivist, and hence that the sense-reference distinction does not solve the problem of fictional names. Proponents of this view often claim that sentences using empty names do not in fact express propositions, hence are not literally meaningful, despite appearances. They face the difficulty of explaining the apparent meaningfulness of sentences using the word Odysseus. On one view, fictional names merely pretend to express propositions. Our understanding of sentences about Odysseus consists then in our "playing along" (see Gareth Evans
Gareth Evans (philosopher)
Gareth Evans was a British philosopher.-Life:Gareth Evans studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University College, Oxford . His philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson...
, Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke
Saul 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...
).
Propositions and senses
Bertrand Russell famously rejected Frege's sense-reference distinction, though there is some possibility that the two were misinterpreting and arguing past one another: Frege talks about (for example) sentences, which have both a sense (a proposition) and a reference (a truth value); Russell on the other hand deals directly with propositions, but construes these not as abstract para-linguistic items but as tupleTuple
In mathematics and computer science, a tuple is an ordered list of elements. In set theory, an n-tuple is a sequence of n elements, where n is a positive integer. There is also one 0-tuple, an empty sequence. An n-tuple is defined inductively using the construction of an ordered pair...
s, or sets, of objects and concepts.
For Russell, sense is wholly semantic. Reference by contrast is intimately connected with the named object. Mont Blanc is the referent of the name "Mont Blanc." Frege argues that the thought "Mont Blanc 'with its snowfields'" cannot be a component of the thought that "Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 meters high". If the same expression "Mont Blanc" is in both sentences then there is something common to each thought, and therefore something corresponding to the name "Mont Blanc." This common element, which cannot be the referent, must be the meaning or "sense."
Senses and descriptions
Russell held the viewTheory of descriptions
The theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's Theory of Descriptions...
that most of the apparent proper names in English are in fact "disguised definite description
Definite description
A 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". So "Aristotle" is understood as "The pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander", or by some other unique description. Although Russell explicitly rejected Frege's notion of sense, he rejected it just for proper names. But Russell also held the view (not evident in the Mont Blanc example) that most of the "proper names" in English are not names at all, but descriptions in disguise. Possibly the only real proper names were demonstrative pronouns like this and that (directed at an object that can be immediately perceived). So in fact if Frege's view was "descriptivist", then he effectively agrees with Russell on most of the apparent "proper names" of ordinary language: Frege thinks that "Aristotle" is a name, with a sense, which is equivalent to some description. Russell thinks that Aristotle is not really a name, but is (in disguised form) just such a description.
Thus for most of the twentieth century the "Frege-Russell" descriptivist view was taken as something of an orthodoxy. In Saul Kripke
Saul Kripke
Saul 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...
's famous Naming and Necessity
Naming and Necessity
Naming and Necessity is a book by the philosopher Saul Kripke that was first published in 1980 and deals with the debates of proper nouns in the philosophy of language. The book is based on a transcript of three lectures given at Princeton University in 1970...
lectures, which largely turned the tide against descriptivism, he treats both Russell and Frege as opposed to Mill's view in the same way. Thus Kripke's argument that names are not equivalent to descriptions was widely construed as the view that names do not have senses; or as a rejection of the sense-reference distinction. (Tellingly, all of the three problems the distinction aimed to solve have subsequently re-emerged as important problems in the philosophy of language.)
This reading of Frege has been rejected by many scholars, most strongly by Gareth Evans
Gareth Evans (philosopher)
Gareth Evans was a British philosopher.-Life:Gareth Evans studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at University College, Oxford . His philosophy tutor was Peter Strawson...
in The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell
John McDowell
John Henry McDowell is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work...
in "The Sense and Reference of a Proper Name", following lines developed by Michael Dummett
Michael Dummett
Sir Michael Anthony Eardley Dummett FBA D.Litt is a British philosopher. He was, until 1992, Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford...
. Dummett argues that Frege's notion of sense should not be equated with a description. Evans further developed this line, arguing that a sense without a referent was not possible. He and McDowell both take the line that Frege's discussion of empty names, and of the idea of sense without reference, are inconsistent, and that his apparent endorsement of descriptivism rests only on a small number of imprecise and perhaps offhand remarks. And both point to the power that the sense-reference distinction 'does' have (i.e., to solve at least the first two problems), even if it is not given a descriptivist reading.
'
Relation to connotation and denotation
The sense-reference distinction is commonly confused with that between connotation and denotationDenotation
This word has distinct meanings in other fields: see denotation . For the opposite of Denotation see Connotation.*In logic, linguistics and semiotics, the denotation of a word or phrase is a part of its meaning; however, the part referred to varies by context:** In grammar and literary theory, the...
, which predates Frege and is famously interpreted by Mill
John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill was a British philosopher, economist and civil servant. An influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy, his conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of...
. This distinction is applied mainly to words (particularly predicates) expressing properties
Property (philosophy)
In modern philosophy, logic, and mathematics a property is an attribute of an object; a red object is said to have the property of redness. The property may be considered a form of object in its own right, able to possess other properties. A property however differs from individual objects in that...
(e.g., red
Red
Red is any of a number of similar colors evoked by light consisting predominantly of the longest wavelengths of light discernible by the human eye, in the wavelength range of roughly 630–740 nm. Longer wavelengths than this are called infrared , and cannot be seen by the naked eye...
, dog
Dog
The domestic dog is a domesticated form of the gray wolf, a member of the Canidae family of the order Carnivora. The term is used for both feral and pet varieties. The dog may have been the first animal to be domesticated, and has been the most widely kept working, hunting, and companion animal in...
, bachelor
Bachelor
A bachelor is a man above the age of majority who has never been married . Unlike his female counterpart, the spinster, a bachelor may have had children...
), rather than naming individuals, so the difference between the two distinctions can be hard to see. The connotation of a predicate is the concept
Concept
The word concept is used in ordinary language as well as in almost all academic disciplines. Particularly in philosophy, psychology and cognitive sciences the term is much used and much discussed. WordNet defines concept: "conception, construct ". However, the meaning of the term concept is much...
it expresses, or more often, the set of properties that determine whether an individual falls under it. The denotation of a concept is the actual collection of entities that do fall under it. Thus the connotation of bachelor is perhaps "unmarried adult male human" and its denotation is all the bachelors in the world.
Under a descriptivist reading of Frege, sense and reference are probably the same as connotation and denotation.
Under a non-descriptivist reading, they are probably not. It is always possible to have a connotation without a denotation, which may not be the case with sense and reference. A given sense always determines the same reference, which might not be the case with connotation and denotation. Most clearly, a single concept—which by definition has only one connotation and denotation (at a time), might be expressed by terms having different senses. For example, cat and feline have precisely the same connotation (member of the Felidae
Felidae
Felidae is the biological family of the cats; a member of this family is called a felid. Felids are the strictest carnivores of the thirteen terrestrial families in the order Carnivora, although the three families of marine mammals comprising the superfamily pinnipedia are as carnivorous as the...
family of carnivorous mammals), and obviously the same denotation (all the cats; that is, all the felines), but it is perfectly intelligible that someone should fail to realize that cat and feline mean the same—perhaps they have only heard one word applied to housecats, the other to tigers and lions. In that case, the words have different senses.
See also
- Aliasing (computing)Aliasing (computing)In computing, aliasing describes a situation in which a data location in memory can be accessed through different symbolic names in the program. Thus, modifying the data through one name implicitly modifies the values associated to all aliased names, which may not be expected by the programmer...
, an example of "sense and reference" in computer programmingComputer programmingComputer programming is the process of designing, writing, testing, debugging, and maintaining the source code of computer programs. This source code is written in one or more programming languages. The purpose of programming is to create a program that performs specific operations or exhibits a...
, where two or more pointers or referencesReference (computer science)In computer science, a reference is a value that enables a program to indirectly access a particular data item, such as a variable or a record, in the computer's memory or in some other storage device. The reference is said to refer to the data item, and accessing those data is called...
point to the same memory location or objectObject (computer science)In computer science, an object is any entity that can be manipulated by the commands of a programming language, such as a value, variable, function, or data structure... - Dihydrogen monoxide hoaxDihydrogen monoxide hoaxIn the dihydrogen monoxide hoax, water is called by an unfamiliar name, "dihydrogen monoxide", followed by a listing of real negative effects of this chemical, in an attempt to convince people that it should be carefully regulated, labeled as hazardous, or banned...
, that exploits the ignorance of many people that the two senses "dihydrogen monoxide" and "waterWaterWater is a chemical substance with the chemical formula H2O. A water molecule contains one oxygen and two hydrogen atoms connected by covalent bonds. Water is a liquid at ambient conditions, but it often co-exists on Earth with its solid state, ice, and gaseous state . Water also exists in a...
" refer to the same chemical substance "H2O", similarly to Frege's example of Hesperus is PhosphorusHesperusIn Greek mythology, Hesperus is the Evening Star, the planet Venus in the evening. He is the son of the dawn goddess Eos and is the brother of Eosphorus , the Morning Star. Hesperus' Roman equivalent is Vesper... - Gottlob FregeGottlob 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...
- Mediated reference theoryMediated reference theoryThe mediated reference theory is a semantic 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...
- On DenotingOn Denoting"On Denoting", written by Bertrand Russell, is one of the most significant and influential philosophical essays of the 20th century. It was published in the philosophy journal Mind in 1905; then reprinted, in both a special 2005 anniversary issue of the same journal and in Russell's Logic and...
, which outlined Bertrand Russell's Philosophy of Language - QuiddityQuiddityIn scholastic philosophy, quiddity was another term for the essence of an object, literally its "whatness," or "what it is." The term derives from the Latin word "quidditas," which was used by the medieval scholastics as a literal translation of the equivalent term in Aristotle's Greek.It...
and HaecceityHaecceityHaecceity is a term from medieval philosophy first coined by Duns Scotus which denotes the discrete qualities, properties or characteristics of a thing which make it a particular thing...
, similar concepts from Medieval philosophyMedieval philosophyMedieval philosophy is the philosophy in the era now known as medieval or the Middle Ages, the period roughly extending from the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD to the Renaissance in the sixteenth century...
. - Russell's ParadoxRussell's paradoxIn the foundations of mathematics, Russell's paradox , discovered by Bertrand Russell in 1901, showed that the naive set theory created by Georg Cantor leads to a contradiction...
, a puzzle-conflict between Russell and Frege - Theory of descriptionsTheory of descriptionsThe theory of descriptions is the philosopher Bertrand Russell's most significant contribution to the philosophy of language. It is also known as Russell's Theory of Descriptions...
External links
- Gottlob Frege: Über Sinn und Bedeutung
- Gottlob Frege: On Sense and Reference (English translation by Max Black)
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Frege and Language.
- Frege's Contribution to the Philosophy of Language by Richard G. Heck and Robert May, published in the Oxford Handbook to the Philosophy of Language