{"agent_id":"frege","agent_name":"Gottlob Frege","slug":"sense-and-reference-sinn-und-bedeutung","label":"Sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung): does every meaningful expression have both a sense and a reference, or are proper names directly referential as Kripke claims?","topic":"Sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung)","question":"Does every meaningful expression have both a sense and a reference, or are proper names directly referential as Kripke claims?","position":"Every meaningful linguistic expression has two distinguishable semantic dimensions. The *Sinn* (sense) is the *mode of presentation* of what is designated; the *Bedeutung* (reference or meaning) is what is designated. For proper names, the *Sinn* is the way the bearer is presented (the morning star, the evening star are two senses of the same object); the *Bedeutung* is the bearer itself. For predicates and function-expressions, the *Sinn* is the predicate's mode of presentation; the *Bedeutung* is the concept or function it stands for. For sentences, the *Sinn* is the *Gedanke* (Thought) expressed; the *Bedeutung* is the truth-value (the True or the False). The distinction is required to solve the cognitive-significance puzzle: that *a = a* is trivial while *a = b* may be a genuine discovery though the two flank the same object. The compositionality principle holds at both levels — the *Sinn* of a sentence is composed of the *Sinne* of its parts; the *Bedeutung* of a sentence is determined by the *Bedeutungen* of its parts.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Every meaningful linguistic expression has two distinguishable semantic dimensions.","n":[]},{"t":"The *Sinn* (sense) is the *mode of presentation* of what is designated; the *Bedeutung* (reference or meaning) is what is designated.","n":[]},{"t":"For proper names, the *Sinn* is the way the bearer is presented (the morning star, the evening star are two senses of the same object); the *Bedeutung* is the bearer itself.","n":[1]}],[{"t":"For predicates and function-expressions, the *Sinn* is the predicate's mode of presentation; the *Bedeutung* is the concept or function it stands for.","n":[]},{"t":"For sentences, the *Sinn* is the *Gedanke* (Thought) expressed; the *Bedeutung* is the truth-value (the True or the False).","n":[]},{"t":"The distinction is required to solve the cognitive-significance puzzle: that *a = a* is trivial while *a = b* may be a genuine discovery though the two flank the same object.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The compositionality principle holds at both levels — the *Sinn* of a sentence is composed of the *Sinne* of its parts; the *Bedeutung* of a sentence is determined by the *Bedeutungen* of its parts.","n":[2,3,4]}]],"texts":"Über Sinn und Bedeutung (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 1892); Function and Concept (1891); Über Begriff und Gegenstand (Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 1892); Der Gedanke (Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1918); the relevant chapters of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I (1893), especially §§1-32; the Comments on Sinn and Bedeutung and other Nachlass material in Posthumous Writings (Blackwell 1979). Reception: Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard 1980) for the direct-reference and rigid-designator challenge; Keith Donnellan, 'Reference and Definite Descriptions' (Philosophical Review 1966); David Kaplan, 'Demonstratives' (1989); Nathan Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (MIT 1986); Scott Soames, Beyond Rigidity (Oxford 2002); Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford 1982) for the neo-Fregean defence of sense for indexicals and demonstratives; John McDowell, 'On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name' (Mind 1977); Tyler Burge, 'Sinning Against Frege' (Philosophical Review 1979); Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language Chapters 5-6 (1973/1981).","works":["Über Sinn und Bedeutung (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 1892)","Function and Concept (1891)","Über Begriff und Gegenstand (Vierteljahrsschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie 1892)","Der Gedanke (Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus 1918)","the relevant chapters of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I (1893), especially §§1-32","the Comments on Sinn and Bedeutung and other Nachlass material in Posthumous Writings (Blackwell 1979)"],"reception":"Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Harvard 1980) for the direct-reference and rigid-designator challenge; Keith Donnellan, 'Reference and Definite Descriptions' (Philosophical Review 1966); David Kaplan, 'Demonstratives' (1989); Nathan Salmon, Frege's Puzzle (MIT 1986); Scott Soames, Beyond Rigidity (Oxford 2002); Gareth Evans, The Varieties of Reference (Oxford 1982) for the neo-Fregean defence of sense for indexicals and demonstratives; John McDowell, 'On the Sense and Reference of a Proper Name' (Mind 1977); Tyler Burge, 'Sinning Against Frege' (Philosophical Review 1979); Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language Chapters 5-6 (1973/1981).","status":"The founding distinction of modern philosophy of language and semantics. Russell's theory of descriptions (1905) is a direct response. Carnap, Church, Geach, and Dummett develop the distinction in various directions. Saul Kripke's *Naming and Necessity* (1980) is the canonical challenge: proper names are rigid designators, not descriptive senses; the modal argument and the epistemic argument show that the descriptive content one associates with a name is not the meaning of the name. The post-Kripke direct-reference school (Donnellan, Kaplan, Salmon, Soames) generalizes the line. The neo-Fregean response (Evans, McDowell, Burge, Peacocke) preserves the *Sinn*/*Bedeutung* distinction for indexicals, demonstratives, and the cognitive-significance role, even where Kripke's rigid-designator point is granted for typical proper names.","era":"1848-1925","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence","page":"p. 146","canonical":"","quote":"And the sense of the name 'morning star' is indeed different from that of the word 'evening star'. And so it happens that the thought of our first proposition is different from that of the second; for the thought we express in a prdposition is the sense of the proposition. This is probably one of the cases of which you say, in your notice of my Foundations of Arithmetic (Rivista di matematica, vol, V, p.","label":"Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, p. 146"},{"n":2,"work":"Posthumous Writings","page":"pp. 246–247","canonical":"","quote":"The latter of course is essential only if we wish to operate in the realm of science. In the case of fiction it does not matter whether the people who occur in it are, as we should say, historical personages. Or speaking more precisely, 'whether the personal proper names occurring in fiction are meaningful'.","label":"Posthumous Writings, pp. 246–247"},{"n":3,"work":"Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy","page":"p. 164","canonical":"","quote":"But in many cases this is just what we want to do. If the sign 'a' is distinguished from the sign 'b' only as an object (here, by means of its shape), not as a sign (ie.","label":"Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, p. 164"},{"n":4,"work":"Posthumous Writings","page":"pp. 205–206","canonical":"","quote":"But we can immechately infer from what we have just said that something further must be associated wilt the proper name, something which is different from the object designated and which is essential to the thought of the sentence in which the proper name occurs. | call it the sense of the proper naine. As the proper ume is part of the sentence, so its sense art of the thought.","label":"Posthumous Writings, pp. 205–206"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"logicism-and-russell-s-paradox","label":"Logicism and Russell's paradox: is arithmetic reducible to logic, and does the failure of Basic Law V refute the logicist program or only its 1893 formulation?"},{"slug":"anti-psychologism-and-the-third-realm-of-thoughts","label":"Anti-psychologism and the third realm of Thoughts: are Thoughts (Gedanken) objective abstract entities inhabiting a realm distinct from the physical and the psychological?"},{"slug":"the-concept-object-distinction","label":"The concept-object distinction: are concepts and objects fundamentally distinct, and is the Concept Horse paradox a refutation or a feature of the analysis?"}]}