Page 212 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

Truth and Meaning
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Sense
There is a perfectly ordinary use of 'sense' which is roughly equivalent to 'meaning' and opposed to 'non- sense.' We say that a sentence is true 'in a sense,' that we 'grasp its sense,' that a word 'has two senses,' and so on. One might hope that we could detail a single notion of the meaning of an expression that would unite these nontechnical uses of 'sense': meaningful expressions have 'meanings,' ambiguous expressions have multiple meanings, the meanings of sentences are things that can be true, that can be grasped, believed, and so on.
1. The Complexity of Meaning
However, Gottlob Frege argued persuasively that no single notion of meaning can play all these roles in a coherent theory. Frege held that an adequate theory of meaning must distinguish two aspects of the mean- ing of an expression. On the one hand there is the expression's 'referent' (Bedeutung), the entity the expression stands for. On the other there is the expression's 'sense' (Sinn), the way the expression pre- sents the referent, or the aspect of the referent cap- tured by the expression. Variants of this distinction have proved popular in philosophy of language, but have all been quite controversial.
2. Sense and Reference
The distinction is easiest to make with respect to singu- lar terms (expressions designating objects). The two expressions 'the morning star' and 'the evening star'
both stand for the planet Venus (so they have the same referent), but the first picks out Venus as the brightest star in the morning, while the second picks it out as the brightest star in the evening (so the expressions have different senses). According to Frege (though this interpretation of him is controversial; see Dummett 1981), the sense of an expression determines its referent, in that its referent is simply whatever entity has the features constituting its sense. This helps explain the fact that 'the morning star is the evening star' can be found informative, and is not a trivial truth concerning Venus'sself-identity; theexplanation is that informativeness is a matter of sense, not refer- ence. The distinction also helps explain how someone might believe that the morning star is visible in the morning, without believing that the evening star is visible in the morning. Statements like these ascribe senses, not merely referents, as the objects of belief.
Frege's distinction forms the centerpiece of his two- level, doubly compositional semantics. The referent of a complex expression (truth value in the case of a sentence, (roughly) a set in the case of a predicate) is determined by only the referents of its component expressions, and the sense of a complex expression (an abstract 'thought' in the case of a sentence) is determined by only the senses of its parts. The truth values of'prepositional attitude' statements likebelief reports depend on the senses and not on the referents of the embedded sentences. This forms no exception to the compositionality of reference, since on Frege's
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