Online Encyclopedia
Sense and reference
The distinction between sense and reference was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892, reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term (a proper name or a definite description) may have meaning, but supposed in principle to be applicable to any kind of linguistic expression.
Several analogous distinctions exist in philosophy of language, and the terminology is still often used inconsistently. Frege's terms were Sinn and Bedeutung, and are most frequently translated as, respectively, sense and reference (or referent). Very confusingly, they are sometimes translated sense and Meaning, and sometimes as meaning and reference(t). This reflects the fact that Frege's distinction aimed to separate two aspects of what is casually called meaning.
In general, sense and reference correspond to the connotation and denotation, or the intension and extension of an expression.
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Outline of the problem
Frege introduced the distinction in über Sinn und Bedeutung in order to account for several problems he had already noticed.
- Identity statements can be informative. That is, "Cicero is Tully" can be used to give a new piece of information, in a way that "Cicero is Cicero" cannot. This suggests that "Cicero" and "Tully" mean different things, since sentences using them convey different information. At the same time, Cicero is Tully, and so in a way they clearly mean the same thing.
Frege's earlier attempt to solve this problem, in his Begriffsschrift, was to claim that identity statements are not about their objects, but rather are about the names they use for those objects. (Something of this approach recurs in Donald Davidson's treatment, not of names but of quotation and indirect discourse.)
- Sentences using empty names appear to be capable of conveying information. For example, if Odysseus is fictional, then the name Odysseus does not appear to mean anyone; yet sentences like "Odysseus was set down on the beach at Ithaca" (or the present sentence) are meaningful and are true or false. If, as seems reasonable, a sentence's meaningfulness, its ability to be true or false, is a function of the meanings of its parts (see Semantic composition ), then the parts of this sentence, such as Odysseus, seemingly do have meaning.
Exactly which names really are empty was in Frege's time, and still is, a matter of dispute. Some philosophers claim that sentences using empty names never express propositions (see Gareth Evans, John McDowell); some of these still maintain the sense-reference distinction for names.
Proper names
Broadly speaking, the reference (or referent) of a proper name is the object it means or indicates. The sense of a proper name is whatever meaning it has, when there is no object to be indicated. Frege justifies the distinction in a number of ways.
1. Sense is something possessed by an name, whether or not it has a reference. For example the name "Odysseus" is intelligible, and therefore has a sense, even though there is no individual object (its reference) to which the name corresponds.
2. Sense is wholly semantic. Reference by contrast, though semantic, is intimately (and puzzingly) connected with the named object. Mont Blanc is the referent of the name "Mont Blanc." But Frege argues that Mont Blanc "with its snowfields" cannot be a component of the thought that Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high (letter to Russell). But if we find the same expression in two sentences, e.g. "Mont Blanc," then we also we recognise something common to the corresponding thoughts, something corresponding to the name "Mont Blanc." This common element, which cannot be the referent, must be the meaning or "sense."
3. The sense of different names is different, even when their reference is the same. Frege argues, in what is probably his most famous philosophical essay, that if an identity statement ("Hesperus is the same planet as Phosophorus") is to be informative, the proper names flanking the identity sign must have a different meaning or sense. But clearly, if the statement is true, they must have the same reference.
Points of dispute
Bertrand Russell famously rejected Frege's sense-reference distinction, though there is some question as to how clearly he understood it. One possibility is that the two were arguing past one another: Frege is 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 tuples , or sets, of objects and concepts.
(Something like the Fregean view of propositions is most common among contemporary philosophers (John McDowell, e.g.) who countenance them; something like the Russellian view has been revived by David Kaplan)
Gareth Evans, for example, has argued that Frege held a Russellian theory of names, according to which there are no thoughts corresponding to empty names. His argument faces the difficulty that Frege did indeed hold that we can express a thought using the name "Odysseus."
The distinction is commonly confused with that between connotation and denotation. (A distinction which predates Frege, famously interpreted by Mill). The "connotation" of a concept-word like "planet" is the concept that the concept-word refers to. Denotation is any object (such as Venus or Mars) which, in Frege's terminology, falls under or satisfies the concept.
Portion of "Larry's text" not yet incorporated into the article
I suppose this looks like a very reasonable theory. But consider now the following objection, which is due to the extremely influential German philosopher and logician, Gottlob Frege, who worked mainly in the late nineteenth century. He wrote a famous article called "On Sense and Reference," in which he said that proper names have two different kinds of meaning: not only their reference, but also their sense. So Frege said that there was more to the meaning of proper names than what they referred to. You also have to consider their sense, he said.
Consider examples like the following. Suppose you know that the name "Cicero" refers to a famous ancient Roman statesman. Well if you didn't know that then you do now. Suppose I tell you next that the name "Tully" refers to an ancient philosopher who was also an orator. I'm sure most of you didn't know that. But now consider. If I were to tell you, "Cicero is Cicero," you'd say, "Yeah, so?" You haven't learned anything then. But if I tell you, "Cicero is Tully," then you have learned something -- and that's a matter of fact, indeed Cicero is Tully; the man's full name was Marcus Tullius Cicero. Well, the argument goes, the only way it can be informative to say that Cicero is Tully is if the two names, "Cicero" and "Tully," differ somehow in their meanings. They have, as Frege said, different senses.
Let me give you another example. Both of the examples are totally hackneyed but if you're going to get a traditional introduction to the theory of meaning then you've got to be exposed to them! There is bright point of light which appears in the morning sky, just before sunrise, called "the Morning Star"; and similarly, just after sunset sometimes you can see a bright point of light in the sky, and this has been called "the Evening Star." And so the proper name, "the Morning Star," refers to a particular celestial object that appears the morning; and the proper name, "the Evening Star," refers to a particular celestial object that appears in the evening. And well, you've probably guessed it -- in fact the Morning Star is the Evening Star, and they are both the planet Venus and not a star at all.
So you've been informed and enlightened; you've been told that the two different names actually refer to the same thing, and you (probably) didn't know that before. If the two names had exactly the same meaning, though, how could it be informative or enlightening to be told that the two names refer to the same thing? They couldn't. So "the Evening Star" must differ somehow in its meaning from "the Morning Star." Since they refer to the same thing, namely Venus, it must be something else about their meaning that differs. And this other thing we call sense. So the sense of "the Morning Star" differs from the sense of the "Evening Star." Frege then said that a proper name denotes its reference and expresses its sense.
So then what sort of thing is a sense? It's basically like a description of a thing the word refers to; you can regard the following as a definition of "sense":
The sense of a proper name is a set of properties that can be expressed as a description that picks out the reference of the name.
To take an example: the sense of "the Morning Star" would be a set of properties that can be expressed as a description; and that description would pick out the planet Venus from among all the other stars and planets in the sky. So the description might be: "the brightest natural object in the sky, aside from the sun and the moon, which appears occasionally before sunrise." Something like that description would express the sense of "the Morning Star." And then how would the description of the sense of "the Evening Star" go? Maybe like this: "the brightest natural object in the sky, aside from the sun and the moon, which appears occasionally after sunset."
Now remember, we started out our discussion of proper names with the referential theory, the "Fido"-Fido Theory, which says that the meaning of a proper name is simply the thing to which it refers. But now if we say, with Frege and some others, that proper names have a sense as well as a reference, then we have to change our theory. So here's the new theory:
External links
- Gottlob Frege: Über Sinn und Bedeutung (.pdf) (German Text)