Gottlob Frege: Sense and Reference

Gottlob Frege:  Sense and Reference

Allow me to introduce the philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege, the man responsible for what is oft called in Analytic Philosophy "The Linguistic Turn".  This is akin to the way that Kant's distinction between noumenal and phenomenal realities was called "The Copernican Turn" wherein we thinkers we turned from a focus on knowing the structure of true reality and such lofty metaphysical ambitions to a focus on knowing the structure of our minds.  Just as Kant's Copernican Revolution did, Frege's Linguistic Turn prompted subsequent generations of philosophers into feverish action to respond to the problems and ideas raised by Frege's arguments and distinctions.  A possible objection is that Frege's system is disagreed with by most modern philosophers of language in the details, but it was profoundly influential and ground-breaking so you might say that its soul lives on in analytic philosophy.  Reflections upon this soul should be adequate for my purposes.

There are three components to language:  signs and meaning, the latter of which is composed of sense and reference

1) Sign:  This is foremost and most obvious.  Signs have arbitrary relationships with meanings; we may assign them to whatever we wish.  The arbitrariness allows for the wonderful freedom and flexibility that makes language possible, but in order for communication to remain stable and reliable, we have no choice but to adopt systems of conventions that relate signs to meanings.  The systems of conventions that we adopt for this task merit a meaty diatribe all their own, and it is one that I whole-heartedly plan to rise to, but here is not the place.  We will only touch upon the problems this presents lightly and tangentially, like the receptionist that you flash an awkward smile as you stride into your main business.

2) Meaning:  What we map signs to.  That's where the naive "common sense" view of semantics, as championed by John Stuart Mill, more or less can be said to grind to a halt before a series of logical labyrinths (informative true identity statements, true negative existence statements, etc.) that it can't squeeze its lumbering form through, and that's where Frege enters the scene to save the day, cape and everything.

2a) Sense:  What a unit of language can be said to state or convey.  Sense translates those idea impressions in our mind's eye into references in the world.  It is object-identifying description.

2b) Reference:  What a unit of language acts upon to determine its truth or falsity.  It is objects and states of affairs, which can in turn give us truth values.

There are some important relationships to be aware of.  Sense DETERMINES reference.  That is to say, sense contains the conditions that need to be met for objects and states of affairs to be referred to successfully.  It follows that two expressions with the same sense ALWAYS have the same reference.  Possibly somewhat counter-intuitively, but very importantly, reference is INDEPENDENT of sense.  Although sense determines reference, reference may be arrived at via different senses (at least generally speaking).  That's a lot to take in, and it's probably a little confusing, so some elucidation might be in order.

Example:  There is something called the Morning Star, and there is something called the Evening Star.  Both the Morning Star and the Evening Star refer to the planet Venus, which is the second planet in our solar system as ordered by distance from the Sun.  The Morning Star and the Evening Star thus possess the same reference.  They do not possess the same sense because they do not have precisely the same conditions for states of affairs (one is a morning star, one is an evening star).  This example illustrates two key things.  It illustrates the difference between sense and reference in a practical case, and it illustrates the independence of reference from sense that I spoke about.  Two signs with different senses end up having the same reference.  This was a motivated example because Frege was quite preoccupied by the problem of informative true identity statements.  By that I mean the following:  Venus=Venus is an identity statement that is uninformative, but Morning Star=Evening Star is a very informative identity statement.  Without sense and reference, or something that serves the same function, you can't make sense of informative identity statements.  To round out this example, consider that signs with equivalent senses must always have the same referent.  Morning Star and Estrella de la Manana (the latter of which is Spanish for Morning Star) will always refer to the same thing, because they are signs with the same sense.

Another helpful pointer might be an alternative parlance for sense and reference.  The more latter day philosopher of science Rudolf Carnap was deeply inspired by Frege's work to the point of attempting to exclude the entirely of metaphysics from the realm of meaningful philosophy by means of language, and he attempted to improve upon Frege's conception of Sense and Reference with the logical terms Intension and Extension.  Intension is functionally analogous to Sense, and Extension is functionally analogous to Reference.  I won't go into Carnap's system here, but the mere impressionistic value of the words of Intension and Extension may help light our way, like adding an additional candle to a dark hallway into the depths.

I will say that the origin of our ideas or thought forms is unimportant to what I'm describing here.  You may conceive of sense as translating between a realm of platonic forms that we access from our unique vantage points, or merely from impressionistic mental fogs that we are powerless to explain.  Your ontology is up to you.  Either way, you surely agree that we possess ideas and thoughts in our mind that are part of an incessantly shifting landscape.  Therefore, the senses that we use to map from this landscape to the world take on a living character, just as we are living conscious creatures.  It's almost like senses tell stories, or parables, and as with any such thing, we all have our take on them.  Senses present a SHAPING force on meaning, like a net or a way, and references present a pulling or pointing force, like an outstretched finger.  Together, they compose meaning, like a musician on an instrument, or even like a musician on their own body, because senses do not require references, and can operate ambiently on stimuli, translating your attention.

We can draw a fitting analogy to computer programming.  Signs are all the little symbols we use as you would imagine, senses are akin to programs, functions, or procedures, and references are like problems we seek to solve.  Programs and problems are mediated by signs because signs are ubiquitous in language, and because our sign languages are subtly different, bugs can crop up that we must attend to even when we communicate with the best of intentions.  Programs are deterministic at bottom; if you input a sign or a bunch of signs, without making things too complex, you will get the same output every time.  Different programs produce different outputs, which leads to the independence of problems from programs.  You can use different programs to accomplish effectively the same thing (though not in all cases, because in that case, you would just have the same program).  This reminds me, I have noticed in our voicing hangouts that a fairly new favorite word is "essentially", with the word "effectively" at a distant second.  The "essentially" is like the sense, and the "effectively" is like the reference.  Essence determines effect, but the same effect can come from different essences.

I hope that helps and wasn't so boring or confusing that you keeled over in agony.