Theories of Semantics on theWeb - Social Semantics: The Search for Meaning on the Web - page 88

sense. Take for example the two sentences “Hesperus is the Evening Star” and
“Phosphorus is the Morning Star” (Frege 1892). Since the ancient Greeks did not
know that 'The Morning Star is the same as the Evening Star,' they did not know that
the names 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' share the same referent when they baptized
the same star, the planet Venus, with two different names (Frege 1892). Therefore,
Frege says that these two sentences have distinct 'senses' even if they share the same
referent. Frege pointed out that, far from being meaningless, statements of identity
that would be mere tautologies from the point of view of a theory of reference are
actually meaningful if one realizes different terms can have distinct senses. One can
understand a statement like 'The Morning Star is the Evening Star' without knowing
that both refer to Venus, and one may only know that the 'Morning Star' refers to
Venus and by learning the 'Morning Star' and the 'Evening Star' are not distinct
senses but a single sense, one can do actual meaningful cognitive work by putting
these two senses together. While the idea of a notion of 'sense' seems intuitive from
the example, it is famously hard to define, even informally. Frege defines 'sense' in
terms of the mysterious mode of presentation , for “to think of then being connected
with a sign (name, combination of words, letters), besides that to which the sign
refers, which may be called the reference of the sign, also what I should like to call
the sense of the sign, wherein the mode of presentation is contained” (1892). This
statement has caused multiple decades of debate by philosophers of language like
Russell and Kripke who have attempted to banish the notion of sense and simply
build a theory of meaning from the concept of reference. One thing is clear, that the
sense is not an idea , an inner and subjective mental representation of a referent .
Regardless of what precisely 'sense' is, Frege believed that the notion of sense is
what allows an agent to understand sentences that may not have a referent, for “the
words 'the celestial body most distant from Earth' has a sense, but it is very doubtful
thereisalsoathingtheyreferto...ingraspingasense,onecertainlyisnotassuredof
referring to anything” (Frege 1892). So it is the concept of sense that should be given
priority over reference. This is not to deny the role of reference whatsoever, since
“to say that reference is not an ingredient in meaning is not to deny that reference
is a consequence of meaning...it is only to say that the understanding which a
speaker of a language has of a word in that language. . . can never consist merely
in his associating a certain thing with it as its referent; there must be some particular
means by which this association is effected, the knowledge of which constitutes his
grasp of its sense” (Dummett 1973).
Sense is in no way an 'encoded' referent, since the referent is distal from the
sense. Instead, the sense of a sentence should naturally lead an agent to correctly
guess the referents of the representational sentence. Yet how could this be detected?
Again, sense is sense strictly 'in the head' with no effect on behavior. As put by
Wittgenstein, “When I think in language, there aren't 'meanings' going through
my mind in addition to the verbal expressions: the language is itself the vehicle
of thought” (Wittgenstein 1953). Sense is the bedrock upon which meaning is
constructed, and must be encoded in a language. In fact, according to Frege, sense
can only be determined from a sentence in a language, and the sense of a sentence
almost always requires an understanding of a whole network of other sentences in a
given discourse.