REFERENCE AND SENSE

 two distinct ways of talking about the

meaning of words and exp.
 talking of SENSE=dealing with
relationships inside language
 talking of REFERENCE=dealing with
relationships between l. and the world
 by means of reference a speaker indicates which
things (including persons) are being talked about
e.g. My son is in the house.
I I
identifies persons identifies things
 REFERENCE-relationship between the English
expression ‘my book’ and the thing you have in
front of you (part of the world)
 The book as a physical object you have in front of you is
the REFERENT of the phrase ‘my book’ (if YOU were to
use that phrase) while REFERENCE is the relationship
between parts of a l. (the phrase ‘my book’) and things
outside the l. (actual picked out object)
 The same expression can be used to refer to different
things- there are as many potential referents for the
phrase ‘my book’ as there are people in the world who
possess books.
Many expressions can have VARIABLE REFERENCE
 There are cases of expressions which in normal
everyday conversation never refer to different
things, i.e. which in most everyday situations that
one can envisage have CONSTANT
REFERENCE.
 However, there is very little constancy of
reference in l. Almost all of the fixing of reference
comes from the context in which expressions are
used.
 Two different expressions can have the
same referent
classical example: ‘the Morning Star’
and ‘the Evening Star’ to refer to the
planet Venus
 List the words and phrases in the text which have the
same referent:
Einstein College today announced the firing of its director. The
chairman of the board of governors said that he had phoned him
last night to inform him that his services were no longer
required. This follows overspending on a new residence for
students, with resulting cutbacks in academic programs. Their
representative, Tracy Sharpe, commented that they now had
nice accomodation but no professors.
Einstein College / its
the director / him (twice) / his
the chairman / he
students / their / they
residence / accomodation
representative / Tracy Sharpe
 Reference-important part of meaning; words like it and they, which
occur in some form in all l. depend on it.
 ‘The Morning Star’ and ‘the Evening Star’ refer
to the same object, but don’t have the same
meaning (‘morning’ and ‘evening’ intuitively have
the opposite m.)
 reference cannot be the whole of m.
 SENSE- intuitive part of meaning which remains
constant when the referent changes (what is
common of the m. of my book, your book...or
President of the Unites States in 2007 and
President of the United States in 1996)
 SENSE of an expression is its place in a
system of semantic relationships with
other expressions in the l.
 one of such semantic relationships is
sameness of meaning
 We can talk about the sense, not only of
words, but also of longer expressions
(phrases and sentences)
 In some cases, the same word can have more than one
sense
 We use the term ‘word’ in the sense of ‘word-form’.
(convenient to treat anything spelled with the same
sequence of letters and pronounced with the same
sequence of phonemes as being the same word). Some
semanticists would regard ‘bank’ as several different words
(different entries in dictionaries).
 One sentence can have different senses as well
Comparing sense and reference
 REFERENT of an expression is a thing or
a person in the world
 SENSE of an expression is not a thing at
all, but an abstraction
 difficult to say what sort of entity the
sense of an expression is; intuitively- that
part of the meaning of an exp. that is left
when reference is factored out
 Every expression that has meaning
has sense, but not every expression
has reference!
 e.g. and, but, almost
 there’s sth. circular about the set of
definitions in a dictionary. Similarly, defining
senses of words often has this circular
nature- sense relations
 sth. semantically complete about a
proposition, as opposed to the sense of a
phrase or a single word.
 Proposition=complete independent
thought
 No direct relationship between reference
and utterance, but both referring and
uttering are acts performed by particular
speakers on particular occasions
 Most utterances are accompanied by one
or more acts of referring.
 Act of referring- picking out of a particular
referent by a speaker in the course of a
single utterance
 Mean/meaning/means/meant-sometimes
used to indicate reference and sometimes
to indicate sense