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Sense is something possessed by a name, whether or not it has a reference. For example, the name "Odysseus" is intelligible, and therefore has a sense, even though there is no individual object (its reference) to which the name corresponds. The sense of different names is different, even when their reference is the same.
Frege's puzzles are puzzles about the semantics of proper names, although related puzzles also arise in the case of indexicals. Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) introduced the puzzle at the beginning of his article "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" ("On Sense and Reference") in 1892 in one of the most influential articles in analytic philosophy and philosophy of language.
In the philosophy of language, the descriptivist theory of proper names (also descriptivist theory of reference) [1] is the view that the meaning or semantic content of a proper name is identical to the descriptions associated with it by speakers, while their referents are determined to be the objects that satisfy these descriptions.
A central topic in semantics concerns the relation between language, world, and mental concepts. Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference ...
Two-dimensionalism is an approach to semantics in analytic philosophy. It is a theory of how to determine the sense and reference of a word and the truth-value of a sentence. It is intended to resolve the puzzle: How is it possible to discover empirically that a necessary truth is true? Two-dimensionalism provides an analysis of the semantics ...
Causal theories of reference were born partially in response to the widespread acceptance of Russellian descriptive theories. Russell found that certain logical contradictions could be avoided if names were considered disguised definite descriptions (a similar view is often attributed to Gottlob Frege, mostly on the strength of a footnoted comment in "On Sense and Reference", although many ...
Another example: "The President of the US in 2001 could not have been Al Gore". The de dicto reading ∃ P r e s 2001 ( P r e s 2001 ≠ A l ) {\displaystyle \Box \exists {Pres_{2001}}(Pres_{2001}\neq Al)} says that, in other accessible possible worlds, even if the result of the 2000 election could differ, the President of the US in 2001 still ...
In any of several fields of study that treat the use of signs — for example, in linguistics, logic, mathematics, semantics, semiotics, and philosophy of language — the extension of a concept, idea, or sign consists of the things to which it applies, in contrast with its comprehension or intension, which consists very roughly of the ideas, properties, or corresponding signs that are implied ...