About meaning and meaning
An essay by Gottlob Frege published in 1892 is about sense and meaning . In it Frege explains the basic concepts of his philosophy of language. The treatise is one of the central texts of the philosophy of language and linguistic semantics.
content
Sense and importance of proper names
The starting point of Frege's considerations is the observation that statements of the form “ a = b ” have a different “cognitive value” than statements of the form “ a = a ”. Here is an example: The morning star is the same celestial body as the evening star (namely Venus ). In contrast to the trivially true statement "morning star = morning star", the statement "morning star = evening star" expresses a knowledge. Frege emphasizes that in the second case the same object (Venus) is “given” in two different ways (once as a celestial body, the first one in the evening, and once as a celestial body, the last one in the sky in the morning).
Frege therefore distinguishes the object for which an expression stands - as its reference object - from the way it is "given". He calls the former (in the example Venus) the “meaning” of the expression in a somewhat misleading way - something like how something can be interpreted - the latter disregarding its “meaning”: “It is now obvious, with a sign (name, word combination , Characters) besides what is designated, what the meaning of the sign may mean, also to think connected what I would like to call the meaning of the sign, in which the way of being given is contained ”(p. 26). According to Frege, “morning star” and “evening star” (p. 27) therefore have a different meaning, but the same meaning, since they refer to the same object. It is important to Frege that the meaning of an expression should not be confused with an “ idea ”. An idea is something purely subjective: “Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem. If two imagine the same thing, each one has his own idea ”(p. 30), while the sense“ can be common property of many ”(p. 29).
Frege first made the distinction between sense and meaning for “ proper names ”. For Frege, a proper name is the "designation of an individual object" (p. 27). Frege uses "object" in a broad sense, in addition to ordinary objects such as houses and tables, he also sees people, places, times and numbers as objects. A proper name can now consist of a single word, but "also of several words or other characters" (ibid.). According to Frege, “morning star”, but also labels such as “the first man on the moon” and terms such as “3 + 5” would be proper names. Frege points out that a “grammatically correct” proper noun “always makes sense” (p. 28). In this sense, however, it does not necessarily have to have a “meaning”. The phrase "the present King of France" has e.g. B. a sense but no "meaning" (since there is no such king to refer to as an object).
Sense and meaning in sentences
In a second step, Frege also applies the distinction to “assertive sentences”. Frege equates the “thought” expressed by such a sentence with its meaning, not with its meaning. The reason is that the meaning of a complex expression must not change if a partial expression is replaced by another with the same meaning (the so-called Frege principle ): “Let us now replace one word in [the sentence] with another of the same Meaning, but in a different sense, this cannot have any influence on the meaning of the sentence ”. (P. 32). In such an operation, however, the expressed thought, "the morning star is a planet" expresses a different thought than "the evening star is a planet" according to Frege, since one could take one sentence as true and the other as false, if you don't know that morning star and evening star are identical. Hence the thought cannot be the meaning of the sentence, it is the sense of the sentence (p. 32).
But what cannot change when one expression is replaced by another with the same meaning is the truth or falsehood of the sentence. Frege therefore understands the meaning of a sentence as its “truth value” (p. 34). Frege knows exactly two truth values : "the true" and "the false". This construction has the somewhat unexpected consequence that sentences are also proper names: "Every assertion sentence [...] is therefore to be understood as a proper name and its meaning [...] is either the true or the false" (ibid.). From Frege's point of view, this is consistent, because a proper name is an expression that means an object, and truth values are objects for him.
Another implication is that all true sentences have the same meaning, as do all false sentences. According to Frege, therefore, it is never just the meaning of a sentence that matters, but always the meaning together with the meaning, the expressed thought. The step from thought to meaning takes place in “judgment” (p. 34): “Judging can be grasped as a progression from a thought to its truth value” (p. 35). This cannot be compared with the relationship between subject and predicate, which stand side by side (pp. 34, 35).
Ordinary, even and odd speech
What has been said that the meaning of a sentence is its truth value, however, only applies if the words are used in an ordinary way, that is, in "ordinary" speech. Frege distinguishes “even” and “odd” speech from ordinary speech . “But it can also happen that you want to talk about the words themselves or about their meaning. That happens, for example, when one cites the words of another in a straight speech. [...] In the odd speech one speaks of the sense, e.g. B. the speech of another. ”(P. 28).
Speech occurs in quotations when an utterance is reproduced verbatim. Odd speech, on the other hand, occurs, for example, with subordinate clauses that are introduced with “because” (p. 48) or with those that are formed with “believe that” (p. 37). In these cases one cannot simply replace one term with another that stands for the same thing. For example, in the sentence “Kepler believes that the morning star is Venus”, one cannot simply replace “morning star” with “evening star”, because it could be that Kepler believes that the morning star but not the evening star is Venus. Nor can one replace the whole subordinate clause with one with the same truth value, e.g. B. by “that Mount Everest is the highest mountain on earth”, because this is certainly not something that Kepler believes.
According to Frege, the meaning of the words in such (subsidiary) clauses is what their meaning is in “ordinary” speech. “So the odd meaning of a word is its ordinary meaning” (p. 28). The sentence as a whole does not mean its truth value either, but instead the thought expressed by it. It is therefore true “that the meaning of the sentence is not always its truth value and that 'morning star' does not always mean the planet Venus, namely not when this word has its odd meaning” (p. 38). According to Frege, the sense of a word or sentence in odd speech is the sense of its ordinary sense (p. 37).
In the case of odd speech, a subordinate clause does not express a thought (but the thought of a thought). Frege deals with another case in which the subordinate clause does not express a thought. His example is
- "If a number is smaller than 1 and larger than 0, its square is also smaller than 1 and larger than 0" (p. 43)
Here the expression “a number” plays the role of a variable , so Frege calls this expression “an indefinite suggestive component” of the sentence (p. 46). Because of this component, the parts of the sentence are incomplete and therefore do not have a complete thought as a sense.
See also
literature
- Thank God Frege: About meaning and meaning. In: Journal for Philosophy and Philosophical Criticism. Volume 100, 1892, pp. 25–50 ( digitized and full text in the German text archive ).
- Also in: Gottlob Frege: Function, Concept, Meaning. Five logical studies. Edited and introduced by Günther Patzig . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1962. pp. 38-63.
- John Lyons : Semantics. Volume I. Beck, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-406-05272-X (for meaning see especially p. 210 ff.).
Web links
Remarks
- ↑ Here and in the following, the page numbers refer to the publication in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Critique, see literature .
