Frege: Sense and Reference

1. The 'Basic Worry'

Sense introduced to deal with two words associated with the same thing, but with different meaning. Also to deal with the problem of reference to non-existents.

For example: Hesperus and Phosphorus.

2. The Function of Language: to communicate; specifically to communicate thought.

3. Psychologicsm and the context principle

It is not true that words mean or refer to ideas. They refer to objects in the world.

Consider: different people who all understand a given word in the same meaning, but associate it with different ideas. If we fail to understand words in the same meaning, communication would be impossible - thus meaning cannot = ideas, otherwise we would all mean different things by the same words.

For example, my understanding of the word ‘star’ may be very different to that of a physicist, but we can have a conversation with one another about stars with no major communication problems!

Secondly, words belong to different areas of human concern... These areas determine their meaning. The basic objects of human concerns are objects, not ideas. Mathematicians concerned with abstract mathematical objects, gardeners with plants...

The context principle: there is nothing more to the meaning of a word than its contribution to the meaning of sentences in which it occurs.

If we do not accept this, will think words must have meaning due to correlation between it + something extra-linguistic, i.e. ideas.

4. A problem for the context principle: 

Seems to conflict with compositionality: the context principle argues sentences are basic, while the principle of compositionality takes words to be basic.

Different kinds of basicness? Sentences basic in understanding of relation between language/what's outside language. Words…