Important aspects of its philosophical basis, and its significance for the foundations of mathematics, appeared in The Foundations of Mathematics (FA, 1884). Six years later, at the beginning of the 1890s, Frege published three articles that mark significant changes in his conception: "Function and Concept" (FC, 1891), "On Sense and Reference" (SR, 1892) and "Concept and Object" (1892). Notable among these changes are: (a) The systematic distinction between the sense and the reference of expressions as two separate ingredients of their (...) meaning. (b) The extension and generalization of the notion of function to include the conception of concepts and relations as functions to truth-values, and the corresponding conception of the two truth-values as objects. These changes were immediately incorporated in the mature, authoritative exposition of his logic in his magnum opus: Basic Laws of Arithmetic (BL), whose first volume appeared in 1893. (shrink)

By any reasonable reckoning, Gottlob Frege's ‘On Sense and Reference’ is one of the more important philosophical papers of all time. Although Frege briefly discusses the sense-reference distinction in an earlier work, it is through ‘Sense and Reference’ that most philosophers have become familiar with it. And the distinction so thoroughly permeates contemporary philosophy of language and mind that it is almost impossible to imagine these subjects without it.The distinction between the sense and the referent of a name is introduced (...) in the second paragraph of ‘Sense and Reference.’. (shrink)

The days when Frege was more footnoted than read are now long gone; still, until very recently he has been read rather selectively. No doubt many had an inkling that there’s more to Frege than the sense/reference distinction; but few, one suspects, thought that his philosophy of mathematics was as fertile and intriguing as the present collection demonstrates. Perhaps, as Paul Benacerraf’s essay in this collection suggests, logical positivism should be held partly responsible for the neglect of this aspect of (...) Frege’s thought, since it contributed to the following common impression of Frege’s philosophy of mathematics: Frege’s project was to reduce arithmetic to logic, in order to provide an empiricist account of mathematical knowledge; Russell’s paradox showed that this was not possible, and that the best that can be done is to reduce arithmetic to set theory; so, Frege’s logicism is demonstrably a philosophical dead end. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege has exerted an enormous influence on the evolution of twentieth-century philosophy, yet the real significance of that influence is still very much a matter of debate. This book provides a completely new and systematic account of Frege's philosophy by focusing on its cornerstone: the theory of sense and reference. Two features distinguish this study from other books on Frege. First, sense and reference are placed absolutely at the core of Frege's work; the author shows that no adequate account (...) of the theory can avoid analysing the notion of thought that underpins it, or explaining how it has clarified our concept of judgement. Second, the theory is situated within the development of Frege's thought; the author reveals how the theory caused Frege to alter many of his fundamental views. In doing so the author presents a clearer picture of the problems the theory was intended to solve, and delineates more sharply the characteristic features of Frege's philosophy. (shrink)

Chapter: Sense and Intentionality A: Reference and Sense — Preliminary Remarks Few people during Frege's lifetime paid due attention to his work and its ...