2. Theory of Reference

“Mark Twain” = “Samuel Clemens” (his real name)

“author of Iliad” = “author of Odyssey”

“Evening Star” = “Morning Star” (the brightest star in the morning and in the night, it is actually not a star, it is the planet Venus, but it is the same object)

“2 + 4” = “3 + 3”

Semantics: theory of meaning

aspects of proper names:

• reference (Bedeutung) – what names refer to; the object to which the term refers (e.g. “planet Venus”)

• sense (Sinn) – what names express; the way that the term refers to the object (e.g. “Evening Star”, “Morning Star”, “Venus”, etc.)

various uses of language:

• science – no interest in sense, reference is all what matters (e.g. Equus ferus caballus)

• poetry – primacy of sense (eg. “horse”, “mount”, “cob”, “foal”, “yearling”, “colt”, “stallion”, “gelding”, “mare”, “filly”, “nag”, “bronco”, “moke”, “steed”, “jade”, etc.)

Triangle of reference according to Frege:

Required reading 1: Gottlob Frege, "Sense and Reference", The Philosophical Review, Vol. 57, No. 3 (1948), pp. 209-230.

1. What is a proper name? designation of single object consisting of several words or other signs

2. Frege writes: "The sense of a proper name is grasped by everybody who is sufficiently familiar with the language or totality of designations to which it belongs…" (p. 210). What about the referent? It only supposes that it exists

3. Explain: "every grammatically well-formed expression representing a proper name always has a sense" (p. 211). Does it have a referent too? It is not specified that the sense has also a referent

4. What is the sense and the reference of these proper names: "the tallest man in the world" and "the golden mountain"?

5. Sometimes one intends to speak about the words themselves, not their referents. How can it be done? We can do it in the reported speech with the phrase “the sense of expression A”, by using the words indirectly