Chapter 1 the Traditional Descriptivist Picture
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چکیده
The modern discussion of reference begins with the reaction of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell to an initially attractive but overly simple conception of meaning and reference. The conception is based on the observation that the most important feature of language is our ability to use it to represent the world. Different sentences represent the world as being different ways, and to sincerely accept, or assertively utter, a sentence is to believe, or assert, that the world is the way the sentence represents it to be. The reason sentences are representational in this way is that they are made up of words and phrases that stand for objects and the properties we take them to have—physical objects, people, ideas, institutions, shapes, sizes, colors, locations, relations, and the rest. What it is for language to be meaningful is for it to have this representational capacity. But if meaning is essentially representational, it would seem that the meaning of any word or phrase should be just what it represents, or stands for. In short, the meaning of an expression is the thing it refers to; and the meaning of a sentence is determined by the words that make it up. Although attractive, and even undeniable in its broad outlines, this picture gives rise to puzzles in particular cases that led Frege and Russell to suggest significant modifications. In “On Sense and Reference,” Frege considered an instance of the general problem posed by the observation that substitution of coreferential terms in a sentence sometimes changes meaning. For example, in each of the following cases he would contend that the (a) sentence differs in meaning from the (b) sentence, even though they differ only in the substitution of terms that designate the same individual.
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تاریخ انتشار 2004