Blackwell Reference Online

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In this chapter we will expound some of the reasons for holding that the concepts of truth and reference (or the family of referential concepts, as we shall shortly explain) are essential to understanding the phenomenon of meaning in language, both in respect of the nature of this phenomenon, and in respect of the accurate description of the semantic properties of human languages, and the relations that hold between a language, considered as an abstract mechanism for the expression of meaning, and the speakers whose language it is. In a number of respects, this view of language may be traced to Gottlob Frege, who however also had other purposes in mind. Nevertheless, it may be well to begin with a version of Frege's views, which traditionally constitute an introduction, both historically and for the student, to the contemporary view of the subject.Frege (1892) proposed that in complete sentences that are naturally broken down into subject and predicate, and expressed something that one could use to make a judgment; e.g., sentences like ‘[The cat] is out,’ or ‘It is raining in [Albequerque],’ where the square brackets indicate the subject position (which may not correspond to the grammatical subject), the truth or falsehood of the judgment depended upon whether the reference of the subject fell under the concept given by the predicate. The notion of the reference of the subject is ... log in or subscribe to read full text