2. Theory of Reference

2. Theory of reference

Plato (5th-4th century BCE)

• an ancient Greek philosopher

• a student of Socrates, the teacher of Aristotle

• the founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the West

• the author of more than thirty dialogues with Socrates as the main speaker

• the creator of the theory of forms that explains how people acquire knowledge and use language

The theory of Forms

• the reality is divided into two realms:

• material world of objects

• immaterial world of forms / ideas

• human soul is a part of the world of forms, it resides there before birth and returns again after death

• knowledge: when getting in contact with objects of the materiál world, we remember the ideal forms that are their prototypes

• language: when using words we understand each other because our words refer to their ideal counterparts in the realm of forms (idea of a cat, then the referents in the real world)

• Triangle of reference according to Plato:

Problems

What about abstract word? What do they refer to?

What about number? Do they exist somehow?

Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914)

• an American mathematician, logician and philosopher

• never published a book during his lifetime; Collected Papers I-VIII (1931-1958)

• the founder of pragmatism, the lecture “How to Make Our Ideas Clear” (1878)

• the inventor of semiotics, i.e. theory of signs

Pragmatism

• the first important philosophical movement from the United States

• began around 1870 in Cambridge, Mass.

• key thinkers: C. S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey

• practically oriented philosophy, against all kinds of speculative thinking

• pragmatic theory of truth and meaning

Semiotics: theory of signs

• according to Peirce, semiotics is the most central science of all, because human understanding is dependent on signs

• definition: a sign is something that stands for something, to someone in some capacity (vague)

• triadic theory of signs:

• representamen – a material vehicle of a sign

• object – a material or abstract entity that is denoted

• interpretant – a meaning in the mind of an addressee

• for comparison: dyadic theory by the Swiss semiologist Ferdinand de

• Saussure (1857-1913) in Cours de linguistique générale (1916) (inventor of semiology, the same as semiotics)

• signifier (“signifiant”) – a material sign in a certain language

• signified (“signifié”) – a mental image associated with a sign

Gottlob Frege (1848-1925)

• a German mathematician and logician

• academically unsuccessful at University of Jena

• unknown and misunderstood during his lifetime; later appreciated by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein

• the father of:

• modern semantics – theory of meaning (“Über Sinn und Bedeutung”, 1892)

• modern logic – symbolic notation (Begriffsschrift (=symbolic letters),1879); improved by George Boole, Giuseppe Peano, Bertrand Russell and others

He started to questioning identity, he was interested, what the “identity” means

a=a is trivial

a=b is significant (new information, interesting)