Language about Language

Philosophy of Mind - Language


Seminar Paper


Frege was born in Wismar, Germany in 1848. He was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher. He is generally considered to be the father of analytic philosophy for his writings on the philosophy of language and mathematics. In his childhood, Frege encountered philosophies that guided his future scientific career. His father wrote a textbook on the German language for children aged 9-13, the first section of which dealt with the structure and logic of language.


Though his education and early work were mathematical, especially geometrical, Frege's thoughts soon turned to logic. He wanted to show that mathematic grows out of logic. He is one of the founders of analytic philosophy, mainly because of his contributions to the philosophy of language.


Frege attacked the psychologistic appeal to mental explanations of the content of judgement of the meaning of sentences. He didn't start with the purpose of answering questions about meaning. He formed his logic to explore the foundations of arithmetic answering questions such as 'What is a number?' But after solving such matters, he found himself analysing and explaining what meaning is, and as a result he came to numerous conclusions that were highly consequential for the subsequent course of anlytic philosophy and the philosophy of language.


In his book, Philosophy of Mind, Anthony Kenny talks about Frege's paper, Sense and Reference, published In 1892. In this, Frege believes in a refrence point, that the meaning of the word can only be understood through other words in the sentence. A term's reference is the object that the term refers to, while the term's sense is the way that the term refers to that object. Frege's ideas are hard to analyse. They are difficult to understand and to explain so I have tried my best to make sense of them although I did find that I was confusing myself. (Although that doesn't take much).


Frege aks if identity is a relation? If it is a relation, is it a relation between signs or between what signs stand for? Frege solved this problem by using the sentence "The morning star is identical to the evening star". He distinguished between two different kinds of signification. Where other philosophers talk of meaning, Frege introduces a distinction between the refernce of an expression and the sense of an expression. He explains that planet Venus is the reference of 'the morning star' and 'the evening star' differs in sense from the morning star even though it has been discovered that both expressions refer to Venus.


I think this means that Frege is showing that two different words can have the same identity, such as morning star and evening star both meaning Venus, and the reference Venus, which is only one word, can have two different meanings or identities. This being the morning star and the evening star. This is Frege's substitutivity principle which means replacing parts of a sentence with other expressions that mean the same thing should leave the meaning of the whole sentence unchanged. He continues to say that in general, an identity statement will be true and informative if the sign of identity is flanked by two names with the same reference but different meanings. Whereas Aristotle disagrees and believes that one word can only have one meaning. The reference point, I think is almost like a nickname. For example, 'dough' and 'cash' both refer to money.


In Frege's account of meaning there are items at three levels: signs, their senses, and their references. It's easy to understand that by using signs we express a sense and denote their reference. Frege believed that every sense would have a sense but only one sense. To put it simply, I think this means that every word can have a meaning but only one meaning. However, there is no requirement that every sense should have only one sign. So this means that every meaning can be referenced through different words. For example, although the words 'bank' and 'port' do have different meanings, each type of spelling of the word bank and each type of spelling of the word port do have one set meaning each. However, this slightly confused because if I were to say the word 'tree', for example, I could be thinking of a christmas tree but someone else could be thinking of an apple tree. So to what extent is it true that every sense has a sense but only one sense because in this case, the word tree gives off different senses.
Bertrand Russell adopted Frege's method of dealing with assertions and denials of existence. For example, if we were to say 'The round square does not exist', although this is true, he says we can't regard it as denying the existence of an object called 'the round square'. This is because to say 'the round square' we are referring to a particular object that must have some existence for us to to be able to refer to it.


Frege explains that the sense of a word is different from a mental image. He explains that images are subjective and vary from person to person whereas, the sense or meaning of a sign is something that is the common property of all users of the language.


Frege questions the thought expressed by a sentence. Is the thought, that is to say the content of the sentence, its sense or its reference? If you were to change a sentence by replacing one word of the sentence by another having the same reference, but a diferent sense, the thought of the sentence changes. For exmaple, the thought in the sentence, 'the morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun' differs from that in the sentence 'the evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun'. This relates to his substitutivity principle that the meaning hasn't actually changed but for somebody who doesn't know that the evening star is the morning star might hold one thought or sentence to be true and the other to be false. Therefore, the answer to his question is thought is the sense of a sentence, because sense is the thought or meaning behind an expression or sentence, and in this case the meaning has changed and substitutivity is violated.


Frege then questioned if the thought expressed by a sentence is not its reference, does the sentence have a reference at all? He agrees that there can be sentences lacking reference which are sentences occuring in works of fiction such as the Odyssey. The reason these sentences lack a reference is because they contain names that lack a reference such as 'Odysseus' which Frege says to be untrue and not a real object so therefore, there is no reference. However, we could question this because even though Odysseus is fiction, we still know what the word refers to.


Towards the end of his life Frege became more interested in aspects of language that were not captured by his system of Logic. This was the 'colouring' in expression of thoughts. Scientific lagnuage presents thoughts in plain black and white but Frege says that in humane disciplines, sentences may clothe thoughts in colourful garb, with expressions of feeling. For example, we interject words and phrases like 'Alas!' and 'Thank God!' and we use charged words like 'cur' instead of plain words like 'dog'. These features of sentences are not concerns of logic because they do not change their truth-value. A sentence that uses the word 'cur' in place of 'dog' does not become false because that word means exactly the same thing.  


According to Frege, in his paper 'The thoughts', the same sentence said by two different people, is said in different contexts and therefore, express different thoughts. One thought may be true and the other false. For example, 'I am hungry' said by Peter expresses a different thought than is expressed by 'I am hungry' said by Paul. Although I think we could argue with this because the word hungry is used by both people and that word gives off only one sense which is the need for food. So, it's not entirely true to say that they express different thoughts. Also, to say they do, in a way contradicts Frege's idea that every sense has a sense but only one sense.

However, Frege does also admit that the opposite can happen. For example, if on the 9th December he was to say it was snowing yesterday, he would be expressing the same thought as if on the 8th December someone says 'It is snowing today'.


Russell disagrees with Fege's idea that every sentence has a proper name with a sense and a reference. Russell believed that any genuine name must stand for something, must 'directly represent some object' but he thought that not all apparent names were genuine names. For example, Russell thought Frege was wrong to treat the word 'Aristotle' and the phrase 'the tutor of Alexander' as being the same kind of symbol, each a name with a sense and a reference. This is understandable because if Aristotle is a genuine proper name then it does not have a sense only a reference. On the other hand, 'the tutor of Alexander' isn't even a name at all, it only has a sense because the tutor of Alexander doesn't have an exact reference.


Kenny explains that Frege and Russell believed it is essential that language should contain only expressions with a definite sense. They meant that all sentences containing expressions shoud have a truth-value. If we allow into our system sentences lacking truth-value, then inference and deduction become impossible.