#sense and reference

[asfaltics]

undra onundra

  it is what it is it was what it isn’t   it isn’t what it was it wasn’t what it isn’t   it wasn’t what it was it isn’t what it wasn’t   it was what it wasn’t it was what it was it wasn’t what it is it wasn’t what it wasn’t   it isn’t what it is it isn’t what it isn’t  

[prototumblinguist]

I write Sinns not Bedeutungs

[lifeasalinguisticsmajor]

Puns I write to myself:

Maybe in some sense, Chomsky was referencing back to Frege. *Ba-dum-ch*

[nillacat]

Today in my linguistics class: Sense and Reference

Teacher: Okay, how about the word "red". We all picture something when we think of the color "red", and that is our sense of the word. What is the first thing that comes to your mind?

Student 1: An apple!

Student 2: A strawberry!

Student 3: A rose!

Student 4: HUMAN BLOOD

[asfaltics]

on sens

detail p56. ex photocopy (ca 1973) of pages in Translations from the Writings of Gottlob Frege — here, his “On Sense and Reference,” (first published in Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 100 (1892): 25-50).

[memeengine]

Sure... Language is a tool of power.

Wes Alwan from Partially Examined Life.

This thought came while considering Frege's "Sense and Reference", and how phrases like "The Will of the People" are sort of vacuous, being without reference.  There's no such thing - really - as the will of the people.

And yet, the words invoke powerful imagery.  This and similar tricks are so often exploited as a "tool of power" by politicians.

[huggingthehorse-blog]

Frege's distinction between Sense and Reference serves to deal with a problem in Identity statements. As Leibniz's Law states about identity, “those things are the same of which one can be substituted for another without loss of truth”. This usually doesn't seem to pose a problem, however if we consider the statements 

(1) The RZA is the RZA

(2) The RZA is the man with the iron fists

we realize that they don't possess the same value for inferential knowledge acquisition. While we can infer statements of the form (1) from the law of identity, we require further premises for (2). Frege therefore states that this difference in cognitive value results from a difference in the 'mode of presentation', which results in two differing Senses with the same Reference. While two different senses such as 'RZA' and 'the man with the iron fists' can have the same reference, the same sentence can refer to different senses. For example, "Prepare these herbs" refers to something different when RZA says it than it does when said by the man with the iron fists.