Philosophy 4331, Lecture 3: Frege, On Sense and Reference

David Boylan

Principle of Compositionality

General idea

 The meaning of a sentence is determined by the meanings of the words in

the sentence, along with the way that they are put together.

This principle makes certain predictions about when two sentences mean the
same thing:

 Since “bachelor" means the same as “unmarried man", the following sen-
tences must mean the same thing:

(1) John is a bachelor.

(2) John is an unmarried man.

 It also that if two sentences have different meanings, then that must be due
to at least one of two things:

∗ They contain some words with different meanings.

∗ Their words are put together differently.

Why did I qualify the compositionality principle with “along with the way
that they are put together"?

Two Versions of the Argument

Frege uses compositionality to argue against Mill’s view of names. First, com- Remember, Mill’s view was that there is noth-
positionality gives us a striking result: ing more to the meaning of a name than the
object it stands for.

 As a matter of fact, Clark Kent is Superman. If you’re distracted by the fact that Super-
man/CK is a fictional character, use a real
 So on the Millian view, the name “Clark Kent" means the same thing as life case where two people are discovered to
be the same e.g. Mark Twain and Samuel
“Superman" Clemens.

 But, given Compositionality, that means these two sentences mean exactly
the same thing:

(3) Superman is Superman.

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(4) Clark Kent is Superman.

As Frege points out, this looks wrong:

 We know a priori that Superman is Superman.

(How could he not be?)

 But we don’t know a priori that Superman is Clark Kent.

That was an empirical discovery!

 Doesn’t that show then that these must mean different things?

Here’s another way of putting the point:

 Consider the following two sentences:

(5) Lois Lane knows that Superman is Superman.

(6) Lois Lane knows that Clark Kent is Superman.

 On the Millian view, together with compositionality, these two sentences

mean the same thing.

 But this cannot be! The first one is true; the second one is false.
Two sentences can’t mean the same thing, if one is true and the other false.

Frege in the text considers a different view, one that he held earlier and
which says:

 “a = b" says that the thing referred to by ‘a’ is the thing referred to by
‘b’.
This would escape the two arguments above.

 The text is unclear about why exactly he changed is mind; the argument
is a bit cryptic. Here’s what Frege says:

In that case the sentence a = b would no longer be concerned with the

subject matter, but only with its mode of designation; we would express
no proper knowledge by its means.

Explain why this view would escape the arguments against the Millian
view.
What do you think Frege’s argument against this view is?
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Frege’s Solution — Sense

Frege concludes that the Millian view is wrong.

 There must be more to the meaning of a name than just what it stands for.

 That extra component Frege calls sense.

What exactly is sense? Frege never really gives a definition, but says various
things about the sense of names.

 The sense of a name is the mode of presentation of the object it names.

 E.g. the name “the Morning Star" presents the object in a certain way, i.e.
the star that appears in the morning.
The name “the Evening Star" presents the same object in a different way, i.e.
as the star that appears in the evening.

 The sense of a name is a certain way of thinking about the object.

The relationship between sense and reference is many-(at most) one. I say “at most" because, as we’ll see in a
minute, a name may have sense without ref-
 If two names have different senses, they could still refer to the same thing. erence.

 But if two names refer to different things, they must have different senses.

Sense is like a recipe for determining the referent.

Big picture point: Frege’s theory of meaning is more complicated than

the intuitive view.
There is more to the meaning of a name than just what it stands for.

So how does this avoid the arguments against the Millian view?

 Both arguments took as their starting point the claim that “Superman is Su-
perman" meant the same thing as “Clark Kent is Superman".

 But, on Frege’s theory, “Clark Kent" doesn’t mean the same thing as “Su-
perman".
They may refer to the same thing. But the names have different senses.

 So the argument does not get off the ground: (3) and (4) mean different things
on Frege’s theory.

Frege seems here to be thinking that compositionality applies to both sense and This raises some questions: what is the sense
reference: (3) and (4) mean different things because they have different senses. of a sentence? And what is the reference of a
sentence? These we’ll come back to in a few
weeks.
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Sense and Ideas

A very important question: what’s the relationship between sense and the ideas
that Locke talked about before?

 Frege claims that the sense of a name is not the same thing as an idea about
the thing the name stands for.

Why not?

 Frege thinks one’s idea of an object as like a picture or internal image of the
object.

 But he also thinks that we can have various different pictures of the same
object, and even of the same sense.
E.g. we might have slightly different ideas of Superman or Santa Clause.

 But we all seem to grasp the same thing by “Superman" and “Santa Clause".
Moreover, we use them to communicate the same things to each other.

 As we saw with Locke, it’s sort of hard to see how this is supposed to work,
if the meaning of a word is a particular person idea.

Question. Do you think Frege’s assumption about ideas is correct?

What might he say to the idea type view we saw last week?

Frege gives a metaphor to help distinguish ideas from sense:

 Imagine Alice, Billy and Carol are looking at the moon through telescopes.
Alice and Billy are looking at it from the same spot at the same angle; Carol
is looking at it from a different spot.

 In all three cases, the light first forms an image in the telescope; then the
light hits the retina and creates a visual impression.

 Crucially the same image forms in Alice and Billy’s telescopes, even though
there are physically distinct impressions caused in the two people.

 The image in the telescope is suppose to be analogous to sense; the visual

impression is analogous to

The metaphor is admittedly a nice one; but it doesn’t completely explain what
senses are.
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This worry is basically the main objection people have made to Frege’s
theory — it’s just not clear what sense really is.

A Potential Advantage of Sense and Reference — Empty Names

Here is a further problem for the Millian view (one that Frege hints at):

 Some names lack a referent, e.g. “Superman", “Santa Claus"

 On the Millian view, the meaning of a name is just what it refers to.
But then doesn’t this mean that “Superman" and “Santa Claus" are mean-
ingless?

This is already pretty implausible as it stands. But we can use Compositionality

to turn this into an argument:

 Consider these two sentences:

(7) If Santa Claus existed, he would go around the world delivering presents
on Christmas Eve.

(8) If Superman existed, he would go around the world delivering presents

on Christmas Eve.

 These don’t seem to mean the same thing: (7) seems true; (8) seems false.

 But then given that the only difference between the two is that (7) uses “Santa
Claus" where (8) uses “Superman", by Compositionality it follows that the
two names have different meanings.

 But then they aren’t meaningless after all!

Frege’s theory potentially offers a solution here: the names still have meaning
because they have sense:

 Frege explicitly says in a number of places that names can have sense but
lack reference.

 He gives the example: This isn’t really a name, but it still makes the
point.

(9) The celestial body most distant from the earth.

If the universe is infinite, then this doesn’t pick out anything. But seems like
either way it’s meaningful.

 So Frege’s answer to the above objection would be that “Santa Claus" has a
different sense from “Superman".
Thus it isn’t a problem that (7) and (8) mean different things.
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One potential issue here though: what does it mean to for a sense to be a mode
of presentation for something that doesn’t exist?

 Doesn’t make sense to talk about presenting (in the normal sense) something
that doesn’t exist!