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58-523: The reference (or " referent "; Bedeutung ) of a proper name is the object it means or indicates ( bedeuten ), whereas its sense ( Sinn ) is what the name expresses. The reference of a sentence is its truth value , whereas its sense is the thought that it expresses. Frege justified the distinction in a number of ways. Much of analytic philosophy is traceable to Frege's philosophy of language. Frege's views on logic (i.e., his idea that some parts of speech are complete by themselves, and are analogous to

116-421: A Proper Name", following Michael Dummett , who argued that Frege's notion of sense should not be equated with a description. Evans further developed this line, arguing that a sense without a referent was not possible. He and McDowell both take the line that Frege's discussion of empty names, and of the idea of sense without reference, are inconsistent, and that his apparent endorsement of descriptivism rests only on

174-410: A change in terminology not evident in the original German. The Greek philosopher Antisthenes , a pupil of Socrates , apparently distinguished "a general object that can be aligned with the meaning of the utterance” from “a particular object of extensional reference". According to Susan Prince, this "suggests that he makes a distinction between sense and reference". The principal basis of Prince's claim

232-493: A denotation (specifically, definite descriptions denote a function from properties to truth values—they are in that sense not syncategorematic , or "incomplete symbols"); but the view retains the essentials of the Russellian analysis, yielding exactly the truth conditions Russell argued for. The Fregean analysis of definite descriptions, implicit in the work of Frege and later defended by Strawson among others, represents

290-427: A function which takes a property f and yields the unique object z that has property f , if there is such a z , and is undefined otherwise.) The presuppositional character of the existence and uniqueness conditions is here reflected in the fact that the definite article denotes a partial function on the set of properties: it is only defined for those properties f which are true of exactly one object. It

348-477: A greater state of immediate awareness. However, it can also lead to circular reasoning , preventing evolution of thought. According to Perceptual Control Theory (PCT), a reference condition is the state toward which a control system's output tends to alter a controlled quantity. The main proposition is that "All behavior is oriented all of the time around the control of certain quantities with respect to specific reference conditions." In academics and scholarship,

406-501: A previous word, the previous word is called the " antecedent ". Gottlob Frege argued that reference cannot be treated as identical with meaning : " Hesperus " (an ancient Greek name for the evening star) and " Phosphorus " (an ancient Greek name for the morning star) both refer to Venus , but the astronomical fact that '"Hesperus" is "Phosphorus"' can still be informative, even if the "meanings" of "Hesperus" and "Phosphorus" are already known. This problem led Frege to distinguish between

464-474: A program to directly access the particular data item. Most programming languages support some form of reference. For the specific type of reference used in the C++ language, see reference (C++) . The notion of reference is also important in relational database theory ; see referential integrity . References to many types of printed matter may come in an electronic or machine-readable form. For books, there exists

522-518: A proper name and the object it refers to, such as between the name 'Earth' and the planet Earth , and the relation of 'falling under', such as when the Earth falls under the concept planet . The relation of a proper name to the object it designates is direct, whereas a word like 'planet' does not have such a direct relation to the Earth; instead, it refers to a concept under which the Earth falls. Moreover, judging of anything that it falls under this concept

580-450: A reference or bibliographical reference is a piece of information provided in a footnote or bibliography of a written work such as a book, article, essay, report, oration or any other text type , specifying the written work of another person used in the creation of that text. A bibliographical reference mostly includes the full name of the author , the title of their work and the year of publication. The primary purpose of references

638-415: A reference. Furthermore, a thought cannot contain the objects that it is about. For example, Mont Blanc , 'with its snowfields', cannot be a component of the thought that Mont Blanc is more than 4,000 metres high. Nor can a thought about Etna contain lumps of solidified lava. Frege's notion of sense is somewhat obscure, and neo-Fregeans have come up with different candidates for its role. Accounts based on

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696-476: A sentence (its truth value) depends on the significance or reference of its parts. Frege introduced the notion of "sense" (German: Sinn ) to accommodate difficulties in his early theory of meaning. First, if the entire significance of a sentence consists of its truth value, it follows that the sentence will have the same significance if we replace a word of the sentence with one having an identical reference, as this will not change its truth value. The reference of

754-473: A small number of imprecise and perhaps offhand remarks. And both point to the power that the sense-reference distinction does have (i.e., to solve at least the first two problems), even if it is not given a descriptivist reading. As noted above, translators of Frege have rendered the German Bedeutung in various ways. The term 'reference' has been the most widely adopted, but this fails to capture

812-442: A thought, a sensory perception that is audible ( onomatopoeia ), visual (text), olfactory , or tactile, emotional state , relationship with other, spacetime coordinates, symbolic or alpha-numeric , a physical object, or an energy projection. In some cases, methods are used that intentionally hide the reference from some observers, as in cryptography . References feature in many spheres of human activity and knowledge, and

870-497: A translator should strive to confront the reader of his version with the same questions of exegesis and not produce a version which in his mind resolves those questions". The term 'meaning' best captures the standard German meaning of Bedeutung . However, while Frege's own use of the term can sound as odd in German for modern readers as when translated into English, the related term deuten does mean 'to point towards'. Though Bedeutung

928-506: A truth value. So we do not have a failure of the Law of Excluded Middle : "the present King of France is bald" (i.e. ∃ x ( ( K x ∧ ∀ y ( K y → y = x ) ) ∧ B x ) {\displaystyle \exists x((Kx\land \forall y(Ky\rightarrow y=x))\land Bx)} ) is false, because there is no present King of France. The negation of this statement

986-401: Is no present King of France . But if it is false, then one would expect that the negation of this statement, that is, "It is not the case that the present King of France is bald", or its logical equivalent , "The present King of France is not bald", is true. But this sentence does not seem to be true either: the present King of France is no more among the things that fail to be bald than among

1044-637: Is proper if X applies to a unique individual or object. For example: " the first person in space " and " the 42nd President of the United States of America " are proper. The definite descriptions "the person in space" and "the Senator from Ohio" are improper because the noun phrase X applies to more than one thing, and the definite descriptions "the first man on Mars" and "the Senator from Washington D.C." are improper because X applies to nothing. Improper descriptions raise some difficult questions about

1102-473: Is a passage in Alexander of Aphrodisias ' “Comments on Aristotle 's 'Topics'” with a three-way distinction: The Stoic doctrine of lekta refers to a correspondence between speech and the object referred to in speech, as distinct from the speech itself. British classicist R. W. Sharples cites lekta as an anticipation of the distinction between sense and reference. The sense-reference distinction

1160-403: Is an extralinguistic entity which Frege called its Bedeutung , literally meaning or significance, but rendered by Frege's translators as reference, referent, 'Meaning', nominatum, etc. Frege supposed that some parts of speech are complete by themselves, and are analogous to the arguments of a mathematical function , but that other parts are incomplete, and contain an empty place, by analogy with

1218-410: Is commonly confused with that between connotation and denotation , which originates with John Stuart Mill . According to Mill, a common term like 'white' denotes all white things, as snow, paper. But according to Frege, a common term does not refer to any individual white thing, but rather to an abstract concept ( Begriff ). We must distinguish between the relation of reference, which holds between

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1276-420: Is no one who is currently King of France and bald: On this disambiguation, the sentence is true (since there is indeed no x that is currently King of France). On a second reading, the negation could be construed as attaching directly to 'bald', so that the sentence means that there is currently a King of France, but that this King fails to be bald: On this disambiguation, the sentence is false (since there

1334-412: Is no x that is currently King of France). Thus, whether "the present King of France is not bald" is true or false depends on how it is interpreted at the level of logical form : if the negation is construed as taking wide scope (as in the first of the above), it is true, whereas if the negation is construed as taking narrow scope (as in the second of the above), it is false. In neither case does it lack

1392-408: Is not a referring expression, as we might naively suppose, but rather an "incomplete symbol" that introduces quantificational structure into sentences in which it occurs. The sentence "the present King of France is bald", for example, is analyzed as a conjunction of the following three quantified statements: More briefly put, the claim is that "The present King of France is bald" says that some x

1450-422: Is not in any way part of our knowledge of what the word 'planet' means. The distinction between connotation and denotation is closer to that between concept and object than to that between 'sense' and 'reference'. Reference A reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation

1508-409: Is not used to claim that there exists a unique present King of France who is bald; instead, that there is a unique present King of France is part of what this sentence presupposes , and what it says is that this individual is bald. If the presupposition fails, the definite description fails to refer , and the sentence as a whole fails to express a proposition . The Fregean view is thus committed to

1566-400: Is not usually used with this etymological proximity in mind in German, German speakers can well make sense of Bedeutung as signifying 'reference', in the sense of it being what Bedeutung points, i.e. refers to. Moreover, 'meaning' captures Frege's early use of Bedeutung well, and it would be problematic to translate Frege's early use as 'meaning' and his later use as 'reference', suggesting

1624-434: Is said to refer to the second object. It is called a name for the second object. The next object, the one to which the first object refers, is called the referent of the first object. A name is usually a phrase or expression, or some other symbolic representation . Its referent may be anything – a material object, a person, an event, an activity, or an abstract concept. References can take on many forms, including:

1682-445: Is similarly accessible. In art , a reference is an item from which a work is based. This may include: Another example of reference is samples of various musical works being incorporated into a new one. Definite description In formal semantics and philosophy of language , a definite description is a denoting phrase in the form of "the X" where X is a noun-phrase or a singular common noun . The definite description

1740-429: Is such that x is currently King of France, and that any y is currently King of France only if y = x, and that x is bald: This is false , since it is not the case that some x is currently King of France. The negation of this sentence, i.e. "The present King of France is not bald", is ambiguous. It could mean one of two things, depending on where we place the negation 'not'. On one reading, it could mean that there

1798-498: Is the one in which 'not' takes wide scope: ¬ ∃ x ( ( K x ∧ ∀ y ( K y → y = x ) ) ∧ B x ) {\displaystyle \lnot \exists x((Kx\land \forall y(Ky\rightarrow y=x))\land Bx)} . This statement is true because there does not exist anything which is currently King of France. Stephen Neale , among others, has defended Russell's theory, and incorporated it into

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1856-485: Is thus undefined on the denotation of the predicate 'currently King of France', since the property of currently being King of France is true of no object; it is similarly undefined on the denotation of the predicate 'Senator of the US', since the property of being a US Senator is true of more than one object. Following the example of Principia Mathematica , it is customary to use a definite description operator symbolized using

1914-580: Is to allow readers to examine the sources of a text, either for validity or to learn more about the subject. Such items are often listed at the end of a work in a section marked References or Bibliography . References are particularly important as for the use of citations , since copying of material by another author without proper reference and / or without required permissions is considered plagiarism , and may be tantamount to copyright infringement , which can be subject to legal proceedings . A reference section contains only those works indeed cited in

1972-563: The ISBN and for journal articles, the Digital object identifier (DOI) is gaining relevance. Information on the Internet may be referred to by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) . In terms of mental processing, a self-reference is used in psychology to establish identification with a mental state during self-analysis. This seeks to allow the individual to develop own frames of reference in

2030-407: The agent (actor) and patient (acted on), as in "The man washed himself", the theme and recipient, as in "I showed Mary to herself", or various other possible combinations. In computer science , references are data types that refer to an object elsewhere in memory and are used to construct a wide variety of data structures , such as linked lists . Generally, a reference is a value that enables

2088-410: The arguments of a mathematical function ) led to his views on a theory of reference . Frege developed his original theory of meaning in early works like Begriffsschrift (concept paper) of 1879 and Grundlagen (Foundations of Arithmetic) of 1884. On this theory, the meaning of a complete sentence consists in its being true or false, and the meaning of each significant expression in the sentence

2146-403: The law of excluded middle , denotation , modality , and mental content . As France is currently a republic , it has no king. Bertrand Russell pointed out that this raises a puzzle about the truth value of the sentence "The present King of France is bald." The sentence does not seem to be true: if we consider all the bald things, the present King of France is not among them, since there

2204-420: The sense and reference of a word. The very concept of the linguistic sign is the combination of content and expression, the former of which may refer entities in the world or refer more abstract concepts, e.g. thought. Certain parts of speech exist only to express reference, namely anaphora such as pronouns . The subset of reflexives expresses co-reference of two participants in a sentence. These could be

2262-409: The "turned" (rotated) Greek lower case iota character "℩". The notation ℩ x ( ϕ x ) {\displaystyle x(\phi x)} means "the unique x {\displaystyle x} such that ϕ x {\displaystyle \phi x} ", and is equivalent to "There is exactly one ϕ {\displaystyle \phi } and it has

2320-440: The 19th century. In patent law, a reference is a document that can be used to show the state of knowledge at a given time and that therefore may make a claimed invention obvious or anticipated . Examples of references are patents of any country, magazine articles, Ph.D. theses that are indexed and thus accessible to those interested in finding information about the subject matter, and to some extent Internet material that

2378-500: The conditions under which either of these sentences could be used to express a true proposition. The Fregean can also hold on to a restricted version of the law of excluded middle: for any sentence whose presuppositions are met (and thus expresses a proposition), either that sentence or its negation is true. On the Fregean view, the definite article 'the' has the following denotation (using lambda notation): (That is, 'the' denotes

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2436-399: The function itself. Thus "Caesar conquered Gaul" divides into the complete term "Caesar", whose reference is Caesar himself, and the incomplete term "—conquered Gaul", whose reference is a concept. Only when the empty place is filled by a proper name does the reference of the completed sentence – its truth value – appear. This early theory of meaning explains how the significance or reference of

2494-489: The kind of truth value gaps (and failures of the law of excluded middle ) that the Russellian analysis is designed to avoid. Since there is currently no King of France, the sentence 'The present King of France is bald' fails to express a proposition, and therefore fails to have a truth value, as does its negation , 'The present King of France is not bald'. The Fregean will account for the fact that these sentences are nevertheless meaningful by relying on speakers' knowledge of

2552-617: The main text of a work. In contrast, a bibliographical section often contains works not cited by the author, but used as background reading or listed as potentially useful to the reader. Keeping a diary allows an individual to use references for personal organization, whether or not anyone else understands the systems of reference used. However, scholars have studied methods of reference because of their key role in communication and co-operation between different people, and also because of misunderstandings that can arise. Modern academic study of bibliographical references has been developing since

2610-410: The meaning of the original German ('meaning' or 'significance'), and does not reflect the decision to standardise key terms across different editions of Frege's works published by Blackwell . The decision was based on the principle of exegetical neutrality : that "if at any point in a text there is a passage that raises for the native speaker legitimate questions of exegesis , then, if at all possible,

2668-405: The person John. The word "it" refers to some previously specified object. The object referred to is called the referent of the word. Sometimes the word-object relation is called " denotation "; the word denotes the object. The converse relation, the relation from object to word, is called " exemplification "; the object exemplifies what the word denotes. In syntactic analysis, if a word refers to

2726-419: The primary alternative to the Russellian theory. On the Fregean analysis, definite descriptions are construed as referring expressions rather than quantificational expressions . Existence and uniqueness are understood as a presupposition of a sentence containing a definite description, rather than part of the content asserted by such a sentence. The sentence 'The present King of France is bald', for example,

2784-659: The property f , and that thing also has the property g .) Given the denotation of the predicates 'present King of France' (again K for short) and 'bald' ( B for short) we then get the Russellian truth conditions via two steps of function application : 'The present King of France is bald' is true if, and only if, ∃ x ( ( K x ∧ ∀ y ( K y → y = x ) ) ∧ B x ) {\displaystyle \exists x((Kx\land \forall y(Ky\rightarrow y=x))\land Bx)} . On this view, definite descriptions like 'the present King of France' do have

2842-628: The same entity in every possible world. For example, someone other than Richard Nixon , e.g. Hubert H. Humphrey , might have been the President in 1969. Hence a description (or cluster of descriptions) cannot be a rigid designator, and thus a proper name cannot mean the same as a description. However, the Russellian descriptivist reading of Frege has been rejected by many scholars, in particular by Gareth Evans in The Varieties of Reference and by John McDowell in "The Sense and Reference of

2900-400: The sense of "connect to" or "link to", as in the meanings of reference described in this article. Another sense is "consult"; this is reflected in such expressions as reference work , reference desk , job reference , etc. In semantics , reference is generally construed as the relationships between nouns or pronouns and objects that are named by them. Hence, the word "John" refers to

2958-510: The term adopts shades of meaning particular to the contexts in which it is used. Some of them are described in the sections below. The word reference is derived from Middle English referren , from Middle French référer , from Latin referre , "to carry back", formed from the prefix re - and ferre , "to bear". A number of words derive from the same root, including refer , referee , referential , referent , referendum . The verb refer (to) and its derivatives may carry

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3016-413: The theory of generalized quantifiers . On this view, 'the' is a quantificational determiner like 'some', 'every', 'most' etc. The determiner 'the' has the following denotation (using lambda notation): (That is, the definite article 'the' denotes a function which takes a pair of properties f and g to truth if, and only if , there exists something that has the property f , only one thing has

3074-585: The things that are bald. We therefore seem to have a violation of the law of excluded middle . Is it meaningless, then? One might suppose so (and some philosophers have) since "the present King of France" certainly does fail to refer . But on the other hand, the sentence "The present King of France is bald" (as well as its negation) seem perfectly intelligible, suggesting that "the present King of France" cannot be meaningless. Russell proposed to resolve this puzzle via his theory of descriptions . A definite description like "the present King of France", he suggested,

3132-414: The thought corresponding to each sentence cannot be its reference, but something else, which Frege called its sense . Second, sentences that contain proper names with no reference cannot have a truth value at all. Yet the sentence 'Odysseus was set ashore at Ithaca while sound asleep' obviously has a sense, even though 'Odysseus' has no reference. The thought remains the same whether or not 'Odysseus' has

3190-459: The view that most proper names in ordinary language are in fact disguised definite descriptions . For example, 'Aristotle' can be understood as "The pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander", or by some other uniquely applying description. This is known as the descriptivist theory of names . Because Frege used definite descriptions in many of his examples, he is often taken to have endorsed the descriptivist theory. Thus Russell's theory of descriptions

3248-449: The whole is determined by the reference of the parts. If the evening star has the same reference as the morning star , it follows that the evening star is a body illuminated by the Sun has the same truth value as the morning star is a body illuminated by the Sun . But it is possible for someone to think that the first sentence is true while also thinking that the second is false. Therefore,

3306-547: The work of Carnap and Church treat sense as an intension , or a function from possible worlds to extensions . For example, the intension of ‘number of planets’ is a function that maps any possible world to the number of planets in that world. John McDowell supplies cognitive and reference-determining roles. Michael Devitt treats senses as causal-historical chains connecting names to referents, allowing that repeated "groundings" in an object account for reference change. In his theory of descriptions , Bertrand Russell held

3364-417: Was conflated with Frege's theory of sense, and for most of the twentieth century this "Frege–Russell" view was the orthodox view of proper name semantics. Saul Kripke argued influentially against the descriptivist theory, asserting that proper names are rigid designators which designate the same object in every possible world. Descriptions, however, such as "the President of the U.S. in 1969" do not designate

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