Gottlob Frege on Sense and Reference: Perspective in Philosophy of Language

Abstract

Gottlob Frege’s original contribution to the province of philosophy of language is enormous. His seminal achievements in the realms of mathematical logic and linguistic analysis, no doubt, elevate him to limelight as a great philosopher par excellence and unarguably one of history’s greatest thinkers whose life and ideas have had profound influence on the intellectual dispositions of contemporary analytic or linguistic philosophers. This paper, therefore, examines the nature and character of language, as a linguistic phenomenon, using the matrix of Frege’s analysis and understanding of sense and reference. It employs the method of textual analysis in its interpretation of Frege’s conception of lexical and sentential semantics. It provides conceptual and logical clarification of salient themes and topical issues bordering on Linguistic Philosophy, Syntax, Semantics, amongst others. It contributes significantly to the general body of knowledge and, of course, adds to the corpus of existing literature on philosophy of language. It posits, in conclusion, that Frege’s thesis that the meaning of a sentence is the association or function of sense and reference is plausible. It recommends that there be a reconstructive adaptation of Frege’s idea or notion of referential concept of meaning.