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Frege argued that the semantics of words and expressions should be divided into two elements: a ''sense'', which is a "mode of presentation" of the reference of the name; and the reference itself, which is the object to which the name refers. And crucially, for Frege, names that refer to the same object can have different senses. (The difference in "cognitive significance" of 'a = a', and 'a = b', where 'a' and 'b' refer to ''the same object'', has been called [[Frege's Puzzle|Frege's problem or puzzle]]. Frege introduces the concept of ''Sinn'', or sense, to explain the difference.) For example, "the morning star" and "the evening star" both refer to the object Venus, but they present it to us in different ways: the former as the brightest celestial body visible in the morning, the latter as the brightest celestial body visible in the evening. And so it is, says Frege, that the statement that the morning star is the evening star is potentially informative: its meaning is not just that some object is the same as itself, but (roughly) that the brightest celestial body visible in the morning is the same object as the brightest celestial body visible in the evening.
It is because Frege uses [[definite description]]s in many of his examples that he is often taken to have endorsed the [[descriptivist theory of names]], an attribution made by [[Saul Kripke]].{{cn|date=March 2013}} Most scholars of Frege's work now agree, however, that the attribution is mistaken. If so, then it is important to distinguish the mediated reference theory from the description theory of names.
== Bertrand Russell ==
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