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The '''mediated reference theory''' is a semantic theory that posits that words referencerefer to something in the external world, but areinsists mediatedthat bythere someis othermore process.to Onethe meaning of a name than simply the paradigmobject casesto ofwhich ait mediatedrefers. referenceIt thus stands opposed to the theory wasof formulated[[direct byreference]]. Its most famous advocate is the mathematician and philosopher [[Gottlob Frege]]. The view was very widely held in the middle of the twentieth century by such philosophers as Sir [[Peter Strawson]] and [[John Searle]].
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. 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.
[[Image:Mediated_reference.gif|thumb|Mediated Reference]]
It is because Frege uses [[definite description]]s in many of his examples that he is often taken to have endorsed the [[description theory of names]], an attribution made by [[Saul Kripke]]. 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.
Frege saw that the semantics of words and expressions could be divided up into two elements: a meaning (or ''sense'') which is a (usually definite) description(s) by which we come to know the reference of an object; and the ''reference'', which is the actual thing being referred to. For example, "the morning star" and "the evening star" are two different senses (i.e. meanings or modes or presentation) which both refer to the object Venus. Both "the morning star" and "the evening star", for Frege, are [[abstract objects]] which exist in a ''third realm'' of thoughts, independent of the mind or the external physical world.
Moreover, sentences and names have different kinds of senses and referents. The sense of a sentence is a proposition, or state of affairs; the reference is a truth value -- "true" or "false". The sense of a proper name is a concept that describes some person; the referent of a proper name is the actual individual in the world.
[Russell thought that names were a sort of description in disguise, which seems to be a similar position to Frege's. However, some scholars (such as [[Gareth Evans]]) have questioned whether Frege did hold such a view.]
There are some exceptions to the mediated reference theory, however. Some names don't seem to point to things in the world as their referent. For example, if a person utters the statement "It is common knowledge that 'Mark Twain' was an author", they are not just talking about the man Mark Twain, but also talking about whether or not people know and recognize something about the expression "Mark Twain". In this case, the expression itself - the signs, the string of words - are the sense of the proposition, and not just the content of the expression. In today's language, these exceptions are called '''opaque contexts'''.
== See also ==
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