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Reference and Sense

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Reference and Sense REFERENCEREFERENCE ANDAND SENSESENSE two distinct ways of talking about the meaning of words and exp. talking of SENSE=dealing with relationships inside language talking of REFERENCE=dealing with relationships between l. and the world by means of reference a speaker indicates which things (including persons) are being talked about e.g. My son is in the house. I I identifies persons identifies things REFERENCE-relationship between the English expression ‘my book’ and the thing you have in front of you (part of the world) The book as a physical object you have in front of you is the REFERENT of the phrase ‘my book’ (if YOU were to use that phrase) while REFERENCE is the relationship between parts of a l. (the phrase ‘my book’) and things outside the l. (actual picked out object) The same expression can be used to refer to different things- there are as many potential referents for the phrase ‘my book’ as there are people in the world who possess books. Many expressions can have VARIABLE REFERENCE There are cases of expressions which in normal everyday conversation never refer to different things, i.e. which in most everyday situations that one can envisage have CONSTANT REFERENCE. However, there is very little constancy of reference in l. Almost all of the fixing of reference comes from the context in which expressions are used. Two different expressions can have the same referent classical example: ‘the Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ to refer to the planet Venus List the words and phrases in the text which have the same referent: Einstein College today announced the firing of its director. The chairman of the board of governors said that he had phoned him last night to inform him that his services were no longer required. This follows overspending on a new residence for students, with resulting cutbacks in academic programs. Their representative, Tracy Sharpe, commented that they now had nice accomodation but no professors. Einstein College / its the director / him (twice) / his the chairman / he students / their / they residence / accomodation representative / Tracy Sharpe Reference-important part of meaning; words like it and they, which occur in some form in all l. depend on it. ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ refer to the same object, but don’t have the same meaning (‘morning’ and ‘evening’ intuitively have the opposite m.) reference cannot be the whole of m. SENSE- intuitive part of meaning which remains constant when the referent changes (what is common of the m. of my book, your book...or President of the Unites States in 2007 and President of the United States in 1996) SENSE of an expression is its place in a system of semantic relationships with other expressions in the l. one of such semantic relationships is sameness of meaning We can talk about the sense, not only of words, but also of longer expressions (phrases and sentences) In some cases, the same word can have more than one sense We use the term ‘word’ in the sense of ‘word-form’. (convenient to treat anything spelled with the same sequence of letters and pronounced with the same sequence of phonemes as being the same word). Some semanticists would regard ‘bank’ as several different words (different entries in dictionaries). One sentence can have different senses as well ComparingComparing sensesense andand referencereference REFERENT of an expression is a thing or a person in the world SENSE of an expression is not a thing at all, but an abstraction difficult to say what sort of entity the sense of an expression is; intuitively- that part of the meaning of an exp. that is left when reference is factored out Every expression that has meaning has sense, but not every expression has reference! e.g. and, but, almost there’s sth. circular about the set of definitions in a dictionary. Similarly, defining senses of words often has this circular nature- sense relations sth. semantically complete about a proposition, as opposed to the sense of a phrase or a single word. Proposition=complete independent thought No direct relationship between reference and utterance, but both referring and uttering are acts performed by particular speakers on particular occasions Most utterances are accompanied by one or more acts of referring. Act of referring- picking out of a particular referent by a speaker in the course of a single utterance Mean/meaning/means/meant-sometimes used to indicate reference and sometimes to indicate sense.
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