FREGE: Sense and Reference Explained
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One of Frege's greatest contributions to the philosophy of language is his distinction between sense and reference. His claim is that the meaning of words comes in two distinct layers, and that layers each have a specific role in our knowledge about the world. In this video I explain this distinction and its importance by first discussing Frege's older theory and why his dissatisfaction with it lead him to distinguish sense and reference. From this it becomes clearer why he drew the surprising consequences that he did regarding the nature of truth.
This video is an introduction to a reasonably advanced, but highly interesting topic. It should be helpful for both those that find philosophy interesting and philosophy students alike. It will also help make sense of some of the debates in analytic philosophy, and provides a counterpoint to Russell's theory of descriptions which is covered in another video.
(Video 4 in the Frege on Truth series.)
#Frege #Sense #Reference
---------Video Contents---------
00:00 - Introduction
00:51 - A Theory of Content
02:46 - Problems with Content
04:56 - A Failed Solution
05:27 - Sense and Reference
12:14 - A Radical Consequence
13:23 - Ending
---------Channel Details---------
This channel features videos about big ideas in philosophy, explained as simply as I can. The focus is on late 19th and early 20th century thought, with a particular emphasis on the British Idealists (e.g. F. H. Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart) and early analytic philosophers (Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Frank Ramsey). Welcome to the channel!
---------My Details---------
I am a PhD student and Gates Scholar at Cambridge near the end of a thesis on Frege's views on Truth. I have lectured at Cambridge on Frank Ramsey and Bertrand Russell, regularly taught undergraduate logic classes, and have also supervised students in metaphysics, philosophy of language, philosophical logic, epistemology, and early analytic philosophy. But I have a keen interest in the British Idealists that I hope to pursue by making videos about what I'm reading, so much of the content of this channel will be an outlet for that interest.
---------References---------
Frege, G. (1972). Conceptual Notation and Related Articles. (T. W. Bynum, Ed. & Trans.). Oxford, UK: Oxford Clarendon Press.
Frege, G. (1979). Posthumous Writings. (H. Hermes, F. Kambartel, & F. Kaulbach, Eds., P. Long & R. White, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Frege, G. (1984). Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy. (B. McGuinness, Ed., M. Black, V. H. Dudman, P. Geach, H. Kaal, E. H. W. Kluge, B. McGuinness, & R. H. Stoothoff, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell.
Can't concentrate because the lampshade looks animated
One of the very few TH-cam philosophy videos that a reasonably intelligent non-philosopher can understand and follow. Thanks!
Analytical philosophy, where all you have to do is define your terms, makes this feasible (though not necessarily easy). I have long ago given up on the word salads expounding on the "continental" tradition (the likes of Kant, Hegel or, my favorite, Heidegger), where the question "what did you mean by this word you just used" is taken as an insult.
This said, I think that much of the problem that Frege was addressing stems from a peculiarity of European languages, where the verb "to be" (être, sein, essere in modern languages, or "sum", and "ειμί" in Latin and classical Greek) is indiscriminately used to mean two entirely different things. It either identifies an object (this "is" my house), or merely assigns it a property (my house "is" small), two entirely different senses. In Chinese, the word/symbol 是 (shi), the closest translation of the English word "is", only conveys identity--as in "this is my house" (这是我的房子)。 There is only one house that is mine. and this is it. 是 is not used to merely assign a property, as in "my house is small"（我的房子很小）。There are myriads of houses that are small. Interestingly, Spanish does attempt to make the distinction (only partially) by using two verbs, "ser" and "estar", either of which can only be translated in English as "to be"--the only European language I am aware of that tries to make the distinction.
Thank you very much for the compliment. I do try to keep the channel both thorough and approachable.
It was interesting to hear that many language distinguish the 'is' of predication (e.g. is small) from the 'is' of identity (e.g. is my house). But Frege is very aware of the difference as he draws a sharp distinction between objects (which can be identical) and concepts (which can be predicated of objects).
The sense/reference distinction, however, is Frege's way of trying to account for the cognitive value difference in certain identity claims, where the 'is' is always the 'is' of identity. Remember he has mathematics in mind, which is very often a matter of identifying numbers with each other.
You might like what I take to be one of the cheekiest footnotes ever from the Anglo-American tradition. Jerry Fodor writes “I suspect that much the same view (sic. pragmatism) is held by such continental icons as Heidegger. But finding out for sure would require reading them which I intend to continue assiduously avoiding".
This is great! I feel I understand it better now than I did 2years ago. Thanks!
Well explained!
Well done. The Vienna circle and their offshoots did a great service to philosophy -- they got rid of metaphysics and none too soon !
As usual, you take complex ideas and explain them well - looking forward to more of these great videos.
Thank you for a high quality presentation on Frege's
sense/reference distinction and theory----and its implications. And also some closely related issues.
Thanks for the compliment!
Thank you
Love this. Very easy to understand.
Excellent! That's the plan. More explainer videos to come 😊
The early remarks of your talk helped me understand Gareth Evans’ discussion of the notational convention he adopts discussing Frege’s concept/object distinction in Varieties of Reference. This may seem a tiny take-home point but for all its brilliance, and not having ever read Frege, I feel Evans’ prose is a bit obscure. I hope that’s fair.
Wow! Superb explanation, made everything crystal clear for me. Subscribed!
Glad it helped! Thanks for the comment.
you explained this very well, i was having a hard time understanding some things but you solved all my questions!
Thanks! Glad to help.
Very helpful to this (old) novice. And I'm anticipating for Frege interview 3/3 with Michael Potter. But I need to watch the first 2 a few more times each. Thank you.
Glad it was helpful. The next Frege interview will happen early next year.
thank you for the video , very clear. but i do have a comment. in you 2 videos with professor potter, especialy in the first one on frege, i emerged that frege was wholly antipsyhologistic. however here in this video, the notion of sense, as i understand it, seems to be almost completely psychologistic.
so one thing i wonder is if this is a different phase of freges thinking, ie previous to his philosophy of arithmetic?
anyway, thanks again, and please know i am not a philosopher.
Thanks another
Been such a long time since I thought about Frege. Just came looking for some samples about truth and ended up watching the whole series. I have been trying to explain to people for years how truth does not work the way they think it should. Definitely changes how the world looks when you think of truth as a value judgement.
Thanks for the comment. I agree that theories of truth besides correspondence are far stronger. My own view is that truth is prior to being. I.e. a thing exists if (and only as much as) we can speak truths concerning it. It is probably a truth primitivism or perhaps an identity theory. So not the same as Frege, but not a million miles away.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy So I am a little fuzzy on this. Are you saying that you view truth as a property of things, or as a property of propositions? (Oh and would you mind if I used some of your audio as samples in music?)
@@DocBolus I'm not sure I would call truth a *property* in the ordinary sense (i.e. truth is not ultimately something we predicate of things, whether propositions, thoughts or otherwise). Although it might qualify as a property in an expended sense of the term, depending on your definition of 'property'. But I do think thoughts are truthbearers in the sense of being that which 'aims at truth'. We cannot understand what a thought *is* unless we understand it as aiming at truth. A bit like we can't understand chess, even if we know all the moves and rules, unless we also understand that the point is to 'win'. Truth is thus a success criterion of thinking which can derivatively be considered a property of the thought the act of thinking concerned. And thoughts are not private entities but public communicable ones, as Frege believes. But unlike Frege, I believe truth is degree theoretic. This means, since I hold truth as prior to being, being is degree theoretic as well. Its a controversial position, but one held by FH Bradley, which I find very convincing for a host of reasons. If you stick around on the channel I hope to get to this stuff in more depth once I get enough subscribers by talking about more popular stuff.
And of course you can sample some audio. I'm flattered.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy thank you,, I normally subscribe to channels like yours under a different identity so I may be back and make myself known. I think I am following here and will reread and mull. Bare with me though its been over 20 years since I studied philosophy so it might take me some time to get my head back in the game.
Thank you for the great presentation! If the function or concept can be the reference of an incomplete expression, it seems pretty plausible to regard truth values as mathematical objects to be referred to by a sentence. After all, the sentence itself is a kind of complete expression.
Correct. And that is, as I'm sure you are aware, one of Frege's justifications for saying the referent of a sentence is an object. I suppose the less intuitive aspect is the idea that sentences *refer to* (rather than just, say, 'have') truth-values in the first place.
I really wish this video existed when I was in a semantics class. Great stuff! Just subbed, I hope your channel takes off!
Thanks for the encouragement!
Very clear and concise video, you’ve just earned yourself a subscriber. With that said, I have a few thoughts on Frege’s ‘sense’ that I wished to share along with a few questions. You described his sense as “the way in which we think about the object when we understand the name” and also as “the way in which the object that it refers to is presented to us”. Speaking to the latter, Frege himself describes ‘sense’ in this manner, though I don’t find it to be coherent as Frege is adamant on separating the syntax or ‘sign’ of a sentence from the ‘sense’ of a sentence, describing sense as a property of the syntax itself. So, what exactly is meant by Frege when he speaks of ‘mode of presentation’?
Your explanation of that was the initial statement I quoted from you, though I must say that this explanation runs contrary to what Frege himself said. ‘The way in which we think about the object when we understand the name’ is, according to Frege, a concept. Frege is insistent on the fact that what he refers to as ‘sense’ is separate from ‘concept’, I quote:
“The conception is subjective: One man's conception is not that of another. There result, as a of course, a variety of differences in the conceptions associated with same sense. A painter, a horseman, and a zoologist will probably connect different conceptions with the name "Bucephalus." This constitutes an essential distinction between the conception and the sense, which may be the common property of many and therefore not a part or a mode of the individual mind.”
So it seems that it cannot be the case that Frege’s ‘sense’ refers to “the way in which we think about the object when we understand the name”. It seems that ‘sense’ is something extremely vague and nearly indescribable, I am bordering on the thought that it’s an incoherent concept, let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for the sub!
Regarding Frege's 'mode of presentation' talk, I agree with you. He is here working under the paradigm of a presented (to our senses) object of perception. But this description breaks down when thinking about abstract objects like numbers, which of course must also be refered to 'via a sense' as he insists elsewhere. That is why I think it better to take his talk of sense determining reference, and as that which we grasp in our mind when hearing the words, as (roughly) our way of thinking about the object referred to by the name, even though, as you say, he doesn't quite put it this way himself.
Most of what you say after is correct. Except: "‘The way in which we think about the object when we understand the name’ is, according to Frege, a concept." For Frege, concepts are not senses but that which predicates refer to. In fact, when we refer to senses, they tend to be objects, because the words used are names and so saturated: "the sense of 'p'" or "the thought that p". Frege is clear that thoughts are objects in his essay "Thoughts". The technical term at issue is 'Begriff', i.e. 'concept', and for Frege these are more akin to what we usually would call a property. They are what adjectives/predicates refer to.
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A good friend of mine was really into Frege. He extolled Frege over against Derrida. I guess I'm hopeless, because I can't see how the binary between Sense and Reference doesn't also breakdown at some point.
I don't know anyone who seriously looks into Frege that doesn't come away impressed. He is a giant of an intellect. Your friend has good taste.
Frege and Derrida are polar opposites in their approach. Frege sees structure everywhere and thinks structurally, Derrida is a 'post-structuralist'. Frege came to philosophy from mathematics where it is much harder for categories to break down in the way Derrida tries to. E.g. do the categories of even and odd numbers break down? Is that even theoretically possible? Frege's logic (and philosophy of language) was a doorway into demonstrating (he hoped, although he failed despite having a very thorough go at it) that mathematics boils down to a simple set of logical principles and axioms. In a way, his work paved the way for computers (conceptually at least). I know little about Derrida, but the kind of categories he targets are much more empirical, e.g. the category of 'a painting', by asking whether the signature counts? And what about the frame? etc.
As for Sense and Reference, these are not binaries of entity for Frege, but distinct layers of meaning. As categories of entity, the boundary shifts. For example, he thinks we can *refer* to thoughts by saying: 'the thought that roses are red'. So the *sense* of 'roses are red' is simultaneously the *reference* of 'the thought that roses are red'. So they are not binary categories of being, but categories of meaning. I'm not sure if Derrida has anything to say about that kind of structure, but I might be wrong.
Thanks a Lot!
You're welcome!
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Hey, very good exposition, well done.
Thanks!
Fascinating !
Glad you enjoyed it. I intend to do a long interview on Frege with an academic soon. Watch this space!
Very interesting presentation, thank you. The Morning Star/Evening Star dichotomy is useful poetically. One makes us think of beginnings, one makes us think of ends. Also, are you familiar with Deleuze's 'Logic if Sense.'
I'm not familiar with Deleuze. I'm an analytic philosopher. (Sorry). Frege was aware of the poetic nature of language. He called the aesthetic aspects of meaning 'colouring'. But he wanted to side-line such semantic content as he thought it was irrelevant to logic, which was his focus in creating a formal language of thought. So I'm sure he'd agree that the colouring, as well as the sense, of the names of Venus differ also.
He is right about language, at least as I understand it, but and this is a big Butt, not about all the ways we think. We think in feelings, language, and images. The important question is: what is the relationship between language, feelings, and images, and what is the relationship between the picture we imagine and the words we use to describe that picture. A word can not be a picture, and vice versa. A description can not be the image it attempts to describe.
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rrm
Excellent summary
Thanks!
Great work!
Thanks!
very clearly articulated. thanks mate!
Thanks for the encouragement!
Thank you sir!
You are welcome!
Thank you.
You're welcome.
I like your videos Keep 'em coming.
Thanks, will do!
Thanks for your valuable explanation in the video. For further discussion, may I know how to distinguish the following similar pair terms?
Referent of a name vs denotation of a name
The confusion of these terms arose when I read the [intro] from Alonzo Church.
Also, can I understand that the sense of a name as its intension of the expression of that name and the referent of a name as its extension?
As I read the book [intro] from Rudolf Carnap, he did not mention sense and the referent but rather divided into three categories which are, expression, intension, and extension. It seems these ideas are closely related to sense and referent but somehow no further discussion on their conceptual distinctions.
Many thanks again and I hope these can be explicated clearly.
Thanks for the comment. I'll tell you what I know in general terms, but be aware that philosophers often use terms in an idiosyncratic way and so you can only really be sure of what the term means by looking at their overall position. And even then there can be disputes about how to understand it!
Referent vs Denotation. These terms are generally synonymous. They tend to refer to what the words/phrases 'point to' out in the real world. Remember that Frege was writing in German, and the word he used was 'Bedeutung'. A direct translation of this into English would be 'meaning', and many of the older translations do use that word. But since he intends 'Bedeutung' to be contrasted with 'Sinn' (sense) it is more usual to translate it as 'reference' to make the distinction clearer. But some actually do translate it as 'denotation' instead. This is a rarer translation because most want to avoid confusion with Russell who uses 'denotation' but has a different idea about what kind of things words denote. Hope this helps!
Intension/Expression/Extension. I have not read Carnap and do not have much knowledge of his philosophy of language. But, based on those terms I would say that 'expression' refers to *words* (i.e. sounds spoken or symbols written) in a language. This would be similar to what Frege calls the 'sign', and so would not be a kind of meaning, but the thing that *has meaning*. 'Intension' tends to refer to a mental entity of meaning directed outward or about something. So intension would probably be similar to Frege's level of sense. Extension tends to refer to things out in the extended world. Carnap's use of the term may be like Frege's level of reference, but may be subtly different in cases of predicates like 'is German'. The reason I say this is that Frege thinks a predicate like 'is German' refers to the concept of being German, but he further thinks this concept has an extension (which is not a concept but an object). The extension of a concept is basically the set of objects that fall under the concept. In this case, the set of all objects that are German! Mathematicians and logicians now tend to use the term 'extension' to refer to this set of objects when they think about the extension of predicates. If that is how Carnap is using it, it would not be the same as what Frege calls the 'referent' of predicates, although it is probably the same as the referent in the case of names. Hope this helps too!
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Thanks for your prompt reply to my comment. I really appreciate your valuable information in this reply which can give me a direction to the more in-depth thinking of the meaning of these terms. This also helps me to reduce the time to search what article am I looking for. Thank you so much again.
@@chiyanlau479 You are welcome!
Top quality presentation. Thank you so much!
You are welcome! Thanks for the encouragement.
It was really helpful!!
Great vid!
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed it.
Thank you for sharing. It's very helpful for me to understand philosophy of language by Frege
Frege is a deep thinker. Time spent understanding his views and the motivation he has for holding them is always rewarded. Thanks for commenting!
Very good Video. thank you very much but I have some questions to understand it more, if you don't mind to give me an explanation: what is the difference between sense and reference and what is the relationship between them?does knowing one entail knowing the other?
Senses are the things we can grasp in our mind. The referents are the things those senses present to our mind. Knowledge, for Frege, is a matter of recognising the truth of thoughts, which are senses. So technically, you can't know things at the level of reference. You can only know things _about_ them.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy can we say then that knowing one entails knowing the other ? There is an entailment ?
@ouafaeslife2247 Not really. Reference is the semantic level at which truth is determined. Sense is the semantic level that constitutes knowledge. Frege thought true thoughts were facts, so facts are senses, not things at the level of reference. What you know are facts, not objects of reference.
This is very good and informative, thank you. If you don't mind me asking, I have a couple of questions in my mind. I was thinking, does the sense-reference distinction apply to all expressions of language. It seems that it is usually discussed in the context of proper names. Why might this be? I know that it is somewhat easy to grasp in the case of proper names. But Frege writes on the second page of Über Sinn und Bedeutung that "It is natural, now, to think of there being connected with a sign (name combination of words, letter), besides that to which the sign refers, which may be called the referent of the sign, also what I would like to call sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained." So does the distinction apply to all signs, that is, names, combination of words, letters? All expressions of language? I find it somewhat hard to understand how the distinction applies to expressions other than proper names. In the case of proper names you have the sense that presents the object that is being referred to and also the very object somewhere in the world.
The famous article _On Sense and Reference_ discusses only proper names, and in other places (mainly published posthumously) Frege focuses on proper names first, as this is the most intuitive case and the one that motivated Frege to make the distinction. But he clearly thought the distinction applied to predicates as well, and thought that from the very start. Before writing _On S&R_ Frege had written a letter to Husserl which has a diagram showing he thought the distinction applied to all sentential elements and the sentence itself: media.springernature.com/lw685/springer-static/image/art%3A10.1007%2Fs11787-022-00308-6/MediaObjects/11787_2022_308_Fig1_HTML.png. Also, after _On S&R_ he wrote a follow up called _Comments on S&R_ which focused on the S&R distinction applied to predicates, but he never manged to get this published.
This is not to say he thought _all_ expression had a sense, since he thought some words didn't have a sense as they didn't affect the thought expressed by the sentence. e.g. the word 'still' in 'Alfred has still not come', since this (Frege thinks) expresses the same thought as 'Alfred has not come' (see _Thoughts_ ). In cases like this, the semantic content is mere 'colouring' which adds an emotive or aesthetic dimension to what is stated, but doesn't affect the assertion. Colouring attends the thought but is not a sense, and such terms do not have a referent either.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Thank you very much. This clarifies what I had in mind. The example about Alfred makes a good point. "Still" seems to presuppose that it has already taken some time and Alfred has not come, but it doesn't affect the content. I wonder whether it is always that easy to tell whether some expressions add to the colouring or to the thought or assertion expressed. Anyway, I will have to look up Frege's Thoughts.
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Excellent! Welcome :).
Tip: pronounce Gotlob as GotLOAB! In german it is also pronounced that way. It means Praise God (or praise be God). The syllable "lob" means to praise (or praise be). The 'o' sound is an elongated sound, like 'oh' as in 'oh my!'
Thanks for the tip! I'll do so from now on.
So "..is German" from "Frege is German" also has a referent, a truth value?
min 6:30
I’d love to learn more about the philosophy of truth and what the implications are for it in modern world where truth has seemingly become subject…. ‘I.e. my/your truth’
Then stick around. Discussions of truth are coming. Both Bradley and Frege were against the equivalent 'subjective' truth of their day too. A view called psychologicism which thought logic was just psychology. So how we reason is just how we happened to evolve to think. Frege thought the view undermined truth, especially the truths of mathematics.
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Thanks for the comment. I'll keep this request in mind for the future.
The sense and reference distinction is useful until you start thinking about indexicals. It seems to me that this theory cannot take into account sentences that are about objects, places, and people in the vicinity of the conversation because the truth value of any propositions that include indexicals is ever changing and contingent on the environment of the subject.
Great thought. You are right. But Frege was well aware of this too. He thinks that thoughts are eternal in nature and eternally true (or false), so the thought expressed by (say) "I am hungry" is different when uttered by different people in different contexts. If I say "I am hungry" on Monday the 1st of May at 2pm, the thought expressed is the same as the sentence "Nathan Hawkins is hungry on Monday the 1st of May at 2pm". If someone else says the same sentence, i.e. "I am hungry", they will express a different thought. In other words, a sentence that is sensitive to context expresses different thoughts, i.e. has different meanings, when expressed in different contexts. So the thought a sentence expresses is not hardwired into the sequence of sounds uttered or letters written. (I don't go into his theory of indexicals in this video as it is a different topic. Instead I use examples where the context is irrelevant to keep things simple. But good thinking, and well noticed!)
Content must also include intent, or synonyms would ruin it.
Care to explain further? How does a synonym like, say, 'sofa' and 'couch' ruin content without intent being included? (And what do you mean by 'intent'?)
I don't know if anyone else is bothered by the subject of a sentence being referred to as the object of a sentence. It's rather ironic that this attempt to make meaning clearer literally introduces a contradiction (effectively a misnomer) into the discussion.
Frege rejected the grammatical form of subject-predicate (and subject-relation-object) as logically irrelevant. The only logical distinction he recognised was between words that refer to objects and those that refer to functions (some of which are concepts).
Technically, for Frege, there is a subject _term_ within a natural language sentence, just as there can be an object _term_ (taking these as grammatical ideas). But the referents of both terms will be objects, and in many cases could be switched without affecting the thought expressed, e.g. in 'Oswald shot Kennedy' and 'Kennedy was shot by Oswald'.
Frege disregards aspects of grammar he sees as unrelated to the truth or falsity of a sentence. He is not trying to clarify meaning _per se_ , but only meaning as is relevant for determining truth. But discussing his wider project would go too far afield, I think.
Frege is the GOAT of analytic philosophy
GOAT: Grandfather of Analytic... what's 'T'? (Or am I way off?)
GOAT- Greatest Of All Time:)
@@ashisaud3618 thanks. Sounds about right 😁
This is no longer philosophy. They had to resolve all these issues when they created Object Orientated Programming Languages. Firstly there is Value Semantics and Reference semantics. With regard to Object "Equality" there is = (have the same value) and == have the same reference (in Java they refer to Objects being equal versus objects being identical). The Concept versus Object distinction looks off whack, because really a Concept should be compared to a Class (Classes can represent concrete things "Men" or abstract things such as Concept of "Marriage"). Objects are instantiations of classes and can be Frege or the marriage of Harry & Meghan. And finally Boolean can be a class with the value true or false but you can have two Boolean Objects which are not identical. I could rewrite all that an couch it in philosophical subtleties, but I have always considered software as applied philosophy so I hope being concrete is interesting.
Interesting. Though I don't see how this would solve the philosophical question. Also, Frege did have classes, or the 'range of values' as he called them. But he thought of these as objects related to the concept, and not as the concept itself. His idea of a concept at the level of reference is a special kind of function, that takes in the object as a value and then returns the True or the False. The range of values, then, is the class of objects such that the function (concept) returns the True.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy Without fully understanding the intricacies of the philosophy I would argue the philosophical problems must have been solved because we have running Object Orientated code that you can use to extract the Freges Objects nationality with (such systems run airlines and passport controls) and can have two separate variables (a morning star variable and an evening star variable) and test whether the content referred to both star variables is the same underlying Object. I am making some unacceptable philosophical leap by claiming if we have a working computer program that we can get correct true or false answers to all of the questions then the philosophical problem is solved? I am not diminishing the importance of Frege, the pioneering computer scientists would have based a lot of what they did on his work.
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7 only has an abstract object, doesn't it
The sign '7' refers to a specific object for Frege, which is the range of values of a particular concept. See my video interview with Professor Potter with the "What are Numbers" thumbnail for more details.
Great vid. Thanks! I'd like to ask a question, if the presenter would be kind enough to explain.
A couple of friends and myself have been discussing this. We have done some reading on these issues, though clearly not enough! The following question has us stumped:
Supposing my friend Linn associates the description -- the 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏 -- "the/that physicist who won a Nobel prize" with the name 𝑹𝒊𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝑭𝒆𝒚𝒏𝒎𝒂𝒏. This is as specific as she can be.
And supposing further that only one person out there satisfies this description. There is only one physicist of that name who has won a Nobel prize.
Linn cannot be certain of this, however. For all she knows, unlikely though it doubtless is, there may be another physicist of the same name who has won a Nobel prize.
Now, if I understand correctly, on the Fregean account (or have I smuggled Russell in?), successful reference is achieved when a name is associated with a description (= a 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏) which 𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒊𝒆𝒔 that person or thing.
In our scenario, Linn's description does indeed pick out a unique individual, but it just 𝒉𝒂𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒏𝒔 to. She got 𝒍𝒖𝒄𝒌𝒚, if you like.
It could, of course, have been otherwise, as opposed to a description such as "the first person to step on the Moon" which is 𝒈𝒖𝒂𝒓𝒂𝒏𝒕𝒆𝒆𝒅 to single out one and only one person, if indeed it is satisfied at all.
So our question is: When Linn uses the name 𝑹𝒊𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝑭𝒆𝒚𝒏𝒎𝒂𝒏 with the description above, according to Frege, does she successfully 𝒓𝒆𝒇𝒆𝒓? Or does this constitute a case of reference failure?
After all, if we don't nip this kinda thing in the bud, we'll have people referring to, or trying to refer to "Pele" as "that guy who plays football". :)
Presumably (assuming Fregean theory) our descriptions need to be far more specific. Is Linn's specific enough? Can her description be said to 𝒖𝒏𝒊𝒒𝒖𝒆𝒍𝒚 𝒊𝒅𝒆𝒏𝒕𝒊𝒇𝒚 Richard Feynman?
Thanks so much for any help you might offer.
Better still, join us on the site where we're having the discussion. :)
P.S. My confusion is such that I'm not even sure whether the description associated with the name is supposed to pick out only a unique individual who satisfies that description (e.g. "the physicist who won a Nobel prize") or an individual 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒂𝒕 𝒏𝒂𝒎𝒆 who satisfies the description (e.g. "the physicist 𝒏𝒂𝒎𝒆𝒅 𝑹𝒊𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝑭𝒆𝒚𝒏𝒎𝒂𝒏 who won a Nobel prize").
In the former case, Linn's description is obviously inadequate, obviously doesn't hook onto a unique individual, and her use of the name 𝑹𝒊𝒄𝒉𝒂𝒓𝒅 𝑭𝒆𝒚𝒏𝒎𝒂𝒏 might as well be referring to Albert Einstein or Niels Bohr. In the latter case, she does pick out only one person, but only with a bit of luck to help her, it seems.
Aarghh!! Help!!
Firstly, how did you get bold and italic text in a comment? As for your question in general, I don't think Frege thought too hard about the sense of proper name in natural language (it wasn't a primary concern of his). There is a footnote in S&R that points in the direction you state, i.e. that proper names have a sense that depends on the knowledge the utterer (or listener) has of the named person. I don't think that claim holds up well though, and that is why Kripke could attack it so easily and successfully.
Okay, so about your question concerning reference failure. Names refer via their sense. In cases of descriptions, that sense should be public and uniform based on a correct grip of language. So a description should refer or fail to refer within an utterance simpliciter. In the case of proper names though its not clear that what Frege says concerning proper names in that footnote would make the sense of a proper name uniform, since one may associate the sense of 'the student of Plato' with the proper name 'Aristotle' while another associates 'the mentor of Alexander the Great'. In that case it would seem that an utterance of 'Pele was Brazilian' might refer or fail to refer based on the knowledge of the utterer or listener.
I think the most Fregean reply would be to say the sentence 'Pele was Brazilian' is ambiguous, in that it can express various thoughts such as the thought that the bloke who plays football well is Brazilian (which may be neither true nor false due to reference failure) and the thought that the joint top goal scorer for Brazil who played for Santos at 15 is Brazilian (which is true due to reference success). Since it is thoughts that are the principle determiners of reference for sentences, there need not be a contradiction. It is not Linn (in your example) that refers or fails to refer, but the sentence via the all-important thought that refers or fails to refer.
To take a related example, a UK billion is 1000 times greater than a US billion. So a sentence such as 'there are over 7 billion people on this planet' is ambiguous regarding the thought it expresses. The 'US' thought is true, the 'UK' thought false. So then, the sentence isn't true or false simpliciter, since it depends what thought is grasped upon hearing it. The primary locus of both truth and reference is the thought. The sentence is just the 'clothing' the thought wears in order to be grasped.
Hope this helps a bit. I think this account is consistent with Frege's semantics, but it isn't very convincing in the case of proper names.
Thanks so much for taking the time to explain. I made three attempts to reply earlier, all of which seemed to vanish. I now suspect this is due to my including a link to a site which generates italic and bold text. If this comment makes it through the bouncers, I've nailed it! Just do a search for "italic text generator" and you should find it.
A little more, if you don't mind . . .
I find it very hard to make sense of (what appears to be) the Fregean view that it is not 𝒔𝒑𝒆𝒂𝒌𝒆𝒓𝒔 who refer, but the names themselves (with the help of a 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏). After all, a name on a piece of paper has no 𝒊𝒏𝒕𝒓𝒊𝒏𝒔𝒊𝒄 intentionality, to borrow John Searle's jargon. It has only 𝒅𝒆𝒓𝒊𝒗𝒆𝒅 intentionality, derived from the mental states of language users which 𝒅𝒐 have intrinsic intentionality.
Do Frege or Russell have anything to say on this?
I also find it unfortunate, misleading even, that almost all the writers I've seen writing on these topics tend to use for their examples highly atypical names such as 𝑨𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒕𝒍𝒆 and 𝑪𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒓𝒐 that we all associate unambiguously with someone famous.
What about all these far more typical John Smiths and Mary Browns! Perhaps you might consider this for a future video, and how Frege-Russell theory applies.
To continue, then, supposing we're all in a bar, perhaps discussing people we admire. When it comes Linn's turn, she says "I really admire David Jones". The rest of us, initially at least, haven't a clue who she's talking about.
As the situation is presented thus far, what's the Fregean account? That Linn has "grasped" a 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏 associated with that particular name? And she could share this with us if pressed? (e.g. "the drummer with [insert band here]" or "the current manager of Partick Thistle F.C."). For now, though, the audience remains 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏less?
Presumably, in a real situation, our obvious reaction would be to ask "Who do you mean?" or some similar locution. Linn would then spill the beans and clear matters up; the referent would then be clear to all, assuming that Linn's description is uniquely satisfied. In Fregean terms, we then all share the same "thought". Is this correct?
Next up, and pardon the vulgarity lol, suppose I visit the bathroom and see written on the wall "For a good time, call Sally". Well, you have to admit, it's far more likely than seeing the standard textbook examples like "Cicero denounced Catiline". :)
Does this written sentence, or the name contained therein, have a pre-attached 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏? If so, what is it? Upon reading it, and assuming I know a Sally or two and consider them in turn, do I grasp various 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏𝒔? What if I don't know any Sally's?
If I'm understanding correctly (probably not), is there not something patently absurd about Frege's notion that Linn might be walking along the street, pick up a random piece of paper on which is written "Jim Black was born in London", and that this name has, or ought to have, a 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏 attached to it? - that this (quoting yourself) "sense should be public and uniform based on a correct grip of language".
Is this what Frege is saying? Is this absurdity (if there is any) disguised by the fact that popular texts invariably choose names like 𝑨𝒓𝒊𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒕𝒍𝒆 and 𝑪𝒊𝒄𝒆𝒓𝒐?
If not, is this 𝑱𝒊𝒎 𝑩𝒍𝒂𝒄𝒌 just a name floating around, both literally and metaphorically, without a 𝒔𝒊𝒏𝒏?
Thanks so much again! My friends and I are following with great interest.
@@AbsolutePhilosophy
→ ← also ϵ are better than =, in fact can do away with =, and ≃ although tricky is ok.
Thank you