Page 213 - Encyclopedia of Philosophy of Language

view the referents of embedded sentences in such state- ments are what normally would be their senses. How- ever, this is an exception to the rule that the referent of an expression is determined independently of facts about which other expressions surround it.
The resulting systematic semantics is impressively powerful and strikes many as intuitively plausible. Unfortunately, the key notion of sense was left obscure by Frege, and later attempts to fill in the details have met with trouble.
3. Troubleswith Sense
One difficulty facing accounts of sense with respect to proper names, is that it seems unlikely that there is a single definite aspect, feature, or group of features of an object universally associated with a given name for it. Frege mentioned that it is a defect of actual languages that the sense of a name can vary from person to person. As one of his chief concerns was with designing a formal language, the tactic of chiding natural language may have seemed adequate, but if Fregean semantics is to be seriously directed at natural languages, the interpersonal variation of sense pre- sents an imposing obstacle. If different persons assign different senses to an expression, it is difficult to explain in what sense they can understand each other's statements. Similarly, it is difficult to explain (what ought to be easy on a Fregean account) how one person can report what another believes or says. This is not only because the two can assign different senses to the same words, but in some cases also because the two might not speak the same language, and sowould not attach the same sense to any expression whatever.
Even if the difficulties about interpersonal differ- ences can be handled, there remains a deeper problem. The notion that the referent of a term is whatever entity has the features constituting its sense (for a
given person), has met with serious, possibly unanswerable challenges from several philosophers, notably Saul Kripke. Kripke argues that which indi- vidual one refers to with the name 'Einstein' does not hinge on what prominent features one attaches to the bearer of the name. If the only feature you attach to 'Einstein' is that he invented the light bulb, then your belief is about Einstein, and you have a false belief about him, not a true belief about Edison (the actual inventor of the light bulb). Your use of 'Einstein' refers to Einstein, Kripke proposes, because of the causal chain leading to your acquisition of the name: you got the name from someone who got the name from someone else who got the name, ultimately, from someone who dubbed Einstein with it. The features you attach to 'Einstein' do not come into determining reference.
In the face of these difficulties, some philosophers have recently pursued amended versions of Fregean semantics. These views give up one or another of the central features of traditional Fregeanism, such as that sense determines reference, or that sense is given by the important features one believes an object to possess (see Peacocke 1983; Forbes 1990).
See also: Frege, Gottlob; Names and Descriptions; Proposition; Reference:Philosophical Issues.
Bibliography
Dummett M 1981 The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy. Duckworth, London
Forbes G 1990 The indispensibility of sinn. Philosophical Review 99
Frege G 1952 Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege. Basil Blackwell, Oxford
Kripke S A 1980 Naming and Necessity. Blackwell, Oxford Peacocke C 1983 Sense and Content. Clarendon Press,
Oxford
Substantial topic-comment research started in the second half of the nineteenth century. Since German linguists, in particular Von der Gabelentz (1868), introduced this notional pair, it has become a fun- damental part of linguistic theory and analysis. Besides linguists, however, philosophers, (formal) semanticists, cognitive scientists and (experimental) psychologists have also studied this subject, mainly from the perspective of the discipline concerned. The
notions 'topic' and 'comment' are generally under- stood in the following way. The notions presuppose that a discourse unit U, a sentence or (part of) a discourse, has the property of being, in some sense, directed at a restricted set of entities and not at all entities that have come up in U. This restricted set of entities is what U 'is about' and constitutes the topic of U. The complementary notion 'comment' refers to what is newly asserted of the topic. The notion 'topic'
Topic andComment J. van Kuppevelt
Topic and Comment
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