NTA NET 2022 : FREGE : SENSE AND REFERENCE : अर्थ व सन्दर्भ : #philosophy #ntanet

Sense and reference "Sinn" redirects here. For other uses, see Sinn (disambiguation). In the philosophy of language, the distinction between sense and reference was an innovation of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892 (in his paper "On Sense and Reference"; German: "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"),reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term may have meaning. The reference (or "referent"; Bedeutung) of a proper name is the object it means or indicates (bedeuten), whereas its sense (Sinn) is what the name expresses. The reference of a sentence is its truth value, whereas its sense is the thought that it expresses.Frege justified the distinction in a number of ways. Sense is something possessed by a name, whether or not it has a reference. For example, the name "Odysseus" is intelligible, and therefore has a sense, even though there is no individual object (its reference) to which the name corresponds. The sense of different names is different, even when their reference is the same. Frege argued that if an identity statement such as "Hesperus is the same planet as Phosphorus" is to be informative, the proper names flanking the identity sign must have a different meaning or sense. But clearly, if the statement is true, they must have the same reference. The sense is a 'mode of presentation', which serves to illuminate only a single aspect of the referent. Much of analytic philosophy is traceable to Frege's philosophy of language. Frege's views on logic (i.e., his idea that some parts of speech are complete by themselves, and are analogous to the arguments of a mathematical function) led to his views on a theory of reference. Sense and description In his theory of descriptions, Bertrand Russell held the view that most proper names in ordinary language are in fact disguised definite descriptions. For example, 'Aristotle' can be understood as "The pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander", or by some other uniquely applying description. This is known as the descriptivist theory of names. Because Frege used definite descriptions in many of his examples, he is often taken to have endorsed the descriptivist theory. Thus Russell's theory of descriptions was conflated with Frege's theory of sense, and for most of the twentieth century this "Frege–Russell" view was the orthodox view of proper name semantics. However, Saul Kripke argued compellingly against the descriptivist theory. According to Kripke, 48–49  proper names are rigid designators which designate the same object in every possible world. Descriptions such as "the President of the U.S. in 1969" do not designate the same in every possible world. For example, someone other than Richard Nixon, e.g. Lyndon B. Johnson, might have been the President in 1969. Hence a description (or cluster of descriptions) cannot be a rigid designator, and thus a proper name cannot mean the same as a description.: 57  However, the Russellian descriptivist reading of Frege has been rejected by many scholars, in particular by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell in "The Sense and Reference of a Proper Name", following Michael Dummett, who argued that Frege's notion of sense should not be equated with a description. Evans further developed this line, arguing that a sense without a referent was not possible. He and McDowell both take the line that Frege's discussion of empty names, and of the idea of sense without reference, are inconsistent, and that his apparent endorsement of descriptivism rests only on a small number of imprecise and perhaps offhand remarks. And both point to the power that the sense-reference distinction does have (i.e., to solve at least the first two problems), even if it is not given a descriptivist reading.