PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE [PHI00073I]

Konstantinos Gkofas
What puzzles me most is the purported incompatibility of Fregean and Russelian
semantics

Gottlob Frege argued that the meaning of a singular term1 should be split into
sense and reference, i.e. the rule for determining the referent and the output of that rule,
the referent, which, in this case, is an object2. He then extended this dichotomy to
predicates (the referents of which are extensions) and sentences (the referents of
which are truth values). Bertrand Russel, on the other hand, avoided postulating senses;
he proposed a different framework that relied heavily on reference as the source of
meaning: sentences with denoting phrases are analysed as two 3 distinct logical
statements (requirements of existence and uniqueness, and the universal quantification
of the sentence’s predicate).
Although there seems to be a consensus amongst philosophers that these two
semantics are incompatible and although Russel himself purportedly criticised Frege’s
approach, I cannot understand why they are considered mutually exclusive. While Frege
was concerned with meaning at all levels of language expression, Russel provided
arguments only for sentence-level meaning (which the author of this essay finds more
compelling than the ones put forward by Frege). Nevertheless, even if one cannot
reconcile the two paradigms as regards sentences, why deny the possibility of
compatibility at the singular term- or predicate-level?
Russel’s framework results in a sentence of the form ‘ the F is G’ being analysed
as:
(I) ∃!χ.F(χ)
(II) ∀χ.(F(χ)→G(χ))

1
proper names, although singular terms, will be set aside for the purpose of this essay
2
a simplification that need no further concern us here
3
three, to be precise, but for the sake of simplification
Still, however, F(χ) stands for a singular term, and G(χ) stands for a predicate. The fact
that Russel reduces natural language to first-order logic does not the fact that the
meaning of these terms has to be somehow computed. How is it possible to judge
whether (I) is true or false if one does not know how to make a meaning out of F (χ), or
the truth value of F(χ)→G(χ) if one does not know how to assign truth values to the
antecedent and the consequent to determine the truth value of the material implication?
Is it plain wrong to import, at this point, the Fregean model and argue for F (χ) having a
sense that picks out (possibly) an object referent, or G(χ) a sense that defines an
extension?
Another point of confusion is Russel’s apparent insistence that it is reference his
theory is based on. Nonetheless, he himself seems to not deny that denoting phrases
may indeed not denote anything, i.e. not designate a particular object, thus not
constituting referring expressions4. On what grounds then are claims that his is a
reference-based analysis if there can be no reference at all? Is it not plausible to instead
argue that it is sense, whether in the Fregean wording, ‘mode of presentation’ or the
Russelian formulation, ‘description content’ that Russel’s analysis is all about?

4
as attributive uses of definite description is a relevant term coined later by Keith Donnellan