Sense and reference

In the philosophy of language, the distinction between sense and reference was an idea of the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege in 1892 (in his paper "On Sense and Reference"; German: "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"),[1] reflecting the two ways he believed a singular term may have meaning.

[4] Frege developed his original theory of meaning in early works like Begriffsschrift (concept paper) of 1879 and Grundlagen (Foundations of Arithmetic) of 1884.

Only when the empty place is filled by a proper name does the reference of the completed sentence – its truth value – appear.

Frege introduced the notion of "sense" (German: Sinn) to accommodate difficulties in his early theory of meaning.

Yet the sentence 'Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep' obviously has a sense, even though 'Odysseus' has no reference.

[10] Accounts based on the work of Carnap[11] and Church[12] treat sense as an intension, or a function from possible worlds to extensions.

[16]: 49 However, the Russellian descriptivist reading of Frege has been rejected by many scholars, in particular by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference[17] and by John McDowell in "The Sense and Reference of a Proper Name",[18] following Michael Dummett, who argued that Frege's notion of sense should not be equated with a description.

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.

British classicist R. W. Sharples cites lekta as an anticipation of the distinction between sense and reference.

[24]: 23 The sense-reference distinction is commonly confused with that between connotation and denotation, which originates with John Stuart Mill.

[26]: 11–13  But according to Frege, a common term does not refer to any individual white thing, but rather to an abstract concept (Begriff).