Blackwell Reference Online

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L ogic, philosophy of language For Frege , every complete sign expresses a sense (German Sinn ) and designates something we call its reference (German Bedeutung ). Frege introduced this distinction by consideration of the statement “The morning star is identical with the evening star.” While the two phrases “the morning star” and “the evening star” designate the same object , the planet Venus, they have different senses. Hence, the sentence “the morning star is the morning star” provides nothing new, while the sentence “the morning star is the evening star” is informative. This distinction is closely related to the distinction between connotation and denotation and between intension and extension . It shows that the meaning or sense of an expression and its reference do not always vary together, a point having considerably influenced the subsequent development of analytic philosophy . For Frege, a basic sentence consists of a referring expression as subject and a predicate as function or concept . Frege called the sense or meaning of a sentence, which is composed of the senses of the components of the sentence, a thought and said that the reference of a sentence is its truth–value. Russell rejected Frege's two basic notions of sense and reference and proposed to deal with meaning using a single basic notion of standing for. “A proper name (word, ... log in or subscribe to read full text