Gottlob Frege · Mathematics
In ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ (1892) Frege solved a puzzle about identity - how ‘the morning star is the evening star’ can be informative though both name Venus - by distinguishing the <em>reference</em> of an expression (the object it stands for) from its <em>sense</em> (the mode of presentation, the way the object is given). It founded the philosophy of language.
You learned that Frege distinguished the Bedeutung (reference, the object named) from the Sinn (sense, the mode of presentation), explaining how identity statements like ‘the morning star is the evening star’ can be informative, and that a sentence’s reference is its truth-value while its sense is th…
Leads to Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
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