5 - The reference of sentences

Summary

Frege's notion of Bedeutung is one of the most controversial notions in his philosophy. There is not even any agreement on how to translate the term into English. Different proposals have been made: “nominatum” (Carnap/Feigl), “reference” (Black), “significance” (Tugendhat), or “meaning”. For a long time, Bedeutung was rendered by “reference”, because Black had translated it that way in the Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, edited by Geach and Black. Now they have changed their minds and translate Bedeutung as “meaning”. The major disadvantage of using “reference” is supposed to be that it suggests a semantic relation between a name and the object designated by it. Fear of this implication would be misplaced. The real problem a translation is faced with stems from the fact that Frege draws a distinction by means of the two expressions Sinn and Bedeutung, both of which belong to colloquial German and are used in many contexts more or less synonymously. It may be that “sense” and “meaning” would best fit the distinction Frege is trying to make, but because rendering Bedeutung as “reference” has become well established in the literature, and because the expression “reference” seems to be harmless if one does not pre suppose the suggestion mentioned, I have chosen it for translating Bedeutung.

What reason did Frege have for introducing the notion of reference? As we know, he used this notion to establish his new conception of judgement: The truth value of a sentence, as one of the components of his former notion of a judgeable content, was considered to be its reference.