Frege on Sense and Reference
- 1892 paper - Sense and Reference
- Is identity a relation?
- It cannot be a relation between objects that signs stand for.
- It cannot be a relation between signs because signs are arbitrary.
- Frege distinguished between two kinds of signification:
- Reference of expression - the object it refers to
- Sense of expression - the mode which a sign presents its object
- An identity statement is true and informative if the sign of identity is flanked by two names with the same reference but different senses.
- All sentences have signs, sense and reference.
- Using signs we express a sense and denote a reference.
- The sense of a word = what we grasp when we understand the word.
- Images are subjective and so are personal.
- The sense of a sign is common to all uses of the language - therefore senses are public and can be passed through generations.
- Frege says that sentences can lack reference, but this is because they contain names that lack a reference, eg Odysseus.
- If a name lacks a reference it does not affect the thought.
- We are driven to accept a sentence's truth value as the reference.
- The relation between a sentence and it's truth value is the same as that between a name and its reference.
- May philosopher accepted Frege's idea of a difference between predication and assertion, but rejected the notion that complete sentences have a reference of any kind.
- Charles Sanders Peirce = similar to Frege.
- Both rejected the traditional way of distinguishing between subject and predicate.
- Propositions are either complete or incomplete (unsaturated) symbols.
- Proper names - Frege called them arguments. Peirce called them indices.
- Frege's concept of expressions and functions Peirce called icons.
- Peirce general theory of signs = Semiotics
- Peirce defined signs in three classes:
- Natural signs. Eg, a cloud is a sign of rain
- Iconic signs. Should share with its object some feature that each could have if the other did not exist. The method of interpreting this feature should be fixed by convention.
- Symbols - determined by convention. most importantly, words.
- Since Peirce, theorists are divided semiotics into three disciplines:
- Syntactics - the study of grammar.
- Semantics - the study of the relationship between language and reality.
- Pragmatics - the study of social context and the purposes and consequences of communication. Meaning and truth.
- Peirce and James explained meaning in similar ways.
- For James the truth of a belief depends on its consequences, or the consequences of believing it.
- Truth is not the same as reality.
- Truth is something known, thought or said about reality.
- Critic of James - attacked the pragmatists account of truth in an article in 1908 - Transatlantic Truth.
- For Russell, one proposition could be true and the other false.
- He was interested in different kinds of meaning that words and phrases might have and the way they might turn out to lack meaning.
- Any genuine proper name must stand for something, it must 'directly represent some object.'
- Frege and Russell aimed to construct a language that would be a more precise instrument than ordinary language.
- For Frege and Russell, it is essential that such a language should contain only expressions with a definite sense.
- Wittgenstein built on Russell's theory of descriptions to analyse the descriptions of complex objects.
- Sentences can be meaning but false.
- Wittgenstein believed language disguised the structure of thought beyond recognition.
- It is the job of philosophy to uncover thought through analysis.
- In his diary on 29/09/1914, Wittgenstein stated that propositions are essentially pictorial in nature.
- He defined picture not only as drawings and painting but as musical scores, maps, etc.
- Representation: What is it representative of? Whether it represents correctly or incorrectly.
- Pictorial form = possibility of structure.
- Pictures can be more of less abstract.
- Logical form = the minimum a picture must have to portray a situation.
- There is an important contrast between names and what they refer to.
- To understand a name is to grasp its reference.
- To understand a proposition is to grasp its sense.
- What Wittgenstein meant by calling a proposition a picture can be summed up in nine theses:
- A proposition is essentially a composite.
- Elements of a proposition are correlated by human decision with elements of reality.
- The combination of these elements presents a possible state of affairs.
- A proposition stands in an essential relation to the possibly situation it represents - shares a logical structure.
- Relationships can only be shown because logical form can only be mirrored not represented.
- Every proposition is bipolar - either true or false.
- A proposition is either true or false by agreeing or disagreeing with reality.
- A proposition must be independent of the actual situation.
- No proposition is a priori true.
- Wittgenstein thought that philosophy is an activity not a theory.
- Ordinary language is embedded in social structures and activities that Wittgenstein called language games.
- Understanding language is a state rather than a process.
- Mental mechanism doctrine - to understand the meaning of a word is to call upon an appropriate image in connection with it.
- To name something is not sufficient to confront it.
- 'Pain' is not a private language.
- There cannot be a language whose words refer to what can only be known to the individual speaker of that language - there can be no private language.
- This is completely contradictory to the following philosophers:
Hume: It is possible for thoughts and experiences to be recognised and classified while the external world is in suspense.
Mill and Schopenhauer: Man can express the contents of his mind in language while questioning the existence of other minds.
All these theories require the possibilty of private language.
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