The history and context of journalism; Chapter 5 of Philosophy in the modern world.

This is my seminar paper from last week, the reading was chapter 5 of  'Philosophy of mind' by Anthony Kenny. The chapter is about language; how it is constructed, and its truth value according to the philosophers; Frege, James, Pierce and Russell.

In the 19^th Century, philosophers began to question meaning in language; what do words and sentences signify and what is their meaning?  Friederich Frege, born in 1848 was one of the philosophers who studied meaning with his paper in 1982 ‘sense and reference’ he questioned identity; is it a relation? If it is, is it a relation between signs or what signs stand for?  He felt that identity couldn’t be a relation between objects that signs stand for and it couldn’t be a relationship between signs because names are arbitrary. ‘The morning star is equal to the evening star' is used as an example

Frege solved this problem by distinguishing between two different kinds of signification; reference and sense. The reference of an expression is the object which is referred to; in this case Venus is the reference of the morning star. The sense of the expression is the particular mode which a sign presents what it designates. ‘The evening star’ has a different sense from ‘the morning star’ even though they are both being referred to as Venus. Two statements with the reference can both be true if the sense if different. Frege said that the distinction of sense and reference could apply to sentences of all kinds.

Frege said that there are items are items at three levels of meaning; signs, their senses and their references. By using signs we express a sense and denote a reference; every sign would have only one sense according to Frege. In language some words and names can have more than one meaning; he felt that we have to be content if the same word has the same sense in the same context but there is no requirement that every sense should have only one sign, and the same sense may be expressed with different signs. Frege believed that the colour of a text could be lost; but this was only important in texts such as poetry and was not as important as sense. The sense of the word comes when we understand the word; it is different from a mental image, even though a mental image may be associated with it because an image is subjective and differs between different people. Sense is common to a language however and not subjective; this way a thought can be passed on through generations.

Frege questioned whether the context of a sentence was its sense or its reference; replacing one word of the sentence with the same reference but a different sense will not change the reference of the sentence, but the thought may change. In the sentence, ‘The morning star is a body illuminated by the sun’ the thought is different from the sentence, ‘The evening star is a body illuminated by the sun’; anyone who did not know that the reference to the morning and evening star being Venus, would think that one of the sentences was correct and one was wrong; therefore the thought of a subject is its sense. Frege does say however that a sentence can lack a reference; such as works of fiction. 

Frege looked at what would happen to the sentence if part of it lacks reference; if a name lacks a reference the thought of the sentence is not affected as thought is from the sense of the sentence and not reference. If a name does not have a reference we are concerned with its truth value. Frege said that we are driven into accepting as the reference of a sentence its truth value, the true, or as the case may be, the false. All true sentences have the same reference as each other, as do the false sentences. Frege says that the relationship between a name and its reference is the same as a sentence and its truth value. Only if we assert a sentence do we say that it is the name of the true, as every serious sentence names a truth value but the mere use of a sentence does not commit the user to specifying its truth. Subject and predicate are elements of thought. Frege eventually gave up on the idea that there were two grand objects of true and false; and accepted that truth was a property and not an object.


 Frege became interested with the ‘colouring of language’ in expression of thoughts; scientific language presents thoughts in black and white, but expression of feeling is described as colourful. We use words with emotion instead of plain words. These words don’t affect truth value and therefore do not concern logic they just expresses the sentence rather than changing its truth.

Frege began concerning himself with the tenses of verbs with indexical expressions such as ‘today’, ‘here’ and ‘I’ He said that if a present tense verb is used, in order for it to be understood you need to know when the sentence was spoken and the same can be said for a first person pronoun; ‘I am hungry’ spoken by one person expresses a different thought expressed by another; the same sentence may express a different thought in different contexts. The structure of the sentence also has to be changed depending on the time the sentence was expressed; ‘it is snowing today’, ‘it was snowing yesterday’.

Charles Pierce, born in 1839 also expressed similar ideas to Frege about language, but using different terminology. He analysed propositions into two kinds; a complete symbol and an incomplete or unsaturated symbol. The proper names that Frege called arguments were called indices by Pierce and Frege’s concept of expressions were called icons. Pierce felt that an important class of icons were expressed for relations; in statements such as ‘Mary loves John’. He extended the notion of relationship in two directions by considering what he called ‘valency’; the number of different relations. He was interested in three place relationships, while introducing monadic relationships for one place predicates and polyadic relationships for two placed relationships.

Pierce’s theory of language was embedded in signs which he called semiotics. He felt that we interpret signs which stand for an object. The interpretation itself is a further sign. The external sign is called a ‘representamen’ while the sign as understood is the ‘interpretant’. Pearce put signs into three classes:

Natural signs: An example would be clouds- as they are natural signs of rain.

Iconic signs: These are signified by resembling their object, e.g. paintings, sculptures and maps. Iconic signs have two features; they should share with it object some feature that each could have if the other did not exist and that the method of interpreting this feature should be fixed by convection.

Symbols: an example is traffic signal or uniforms. They do not always resemble their objects.

After Pierce, semiotics has been divided into three disciplines; Syntactics; the study of grammar and grammatical structure, semantics; the study of relationship between language and reality, and pragmatics; the study of the social context and the purposes and consequences of communication. Peirce’s followers focussed upon the two key concepts of semantics; meaning and truth.

Pierce felt that in order to discover what an utterance meant, the practical consequences of it being true had to be explored. If there wasn’t a difference between the consequences of two different beliefs then they were in fact the same belief.  William James agreed with Pierce on this matter, but he believed that the truth of a belief and not just its meaning depended on its consequences. James believed that truth was part of our beliefs and follow satisfactions. The pragmatist’s idea of truth is a challenge to a belief that can be accepted and his own stand taken accordingly.  The definition of truth according to James was something known, thought or said about the reality; independent to any believer. For the statement; ‘the desk exists’ to be true, the desk must be able to be shaken by someone else. To explain that the desk is to your mind the same as the desk you see. Satisfaction is then gained and the statement confirmed as true by the verification of someone else.

Bertrand Russell however was a critic of James and the pragmatist account of truth. He believed that according to pragmatists ‘it is true that other people exists’ means that ‘it is useful for other people to exist’ but if this is the case then the two phrases are just different words which mean the same thing. Therefore as a pragmatist if I believe one I believe the other. But Russell felt that one statement could be true while the other false.  He said that it was better to settle a question than to settle the question whether thinking something is good.

Russell was however was more interested on the different kind of meaning that words and phrases have and less on truth. His idea of being was that it belonged to every conceivable term and every possible object of thought whether it is true or false, because if it was nothing then it would not be anyway. Being is a general attribute of everything and to mention it is to show that it is. He adopted Frege’s method of dealing with assertions and denials of existence; He said that if a statement seems true such as ‘The round square does not exist’ we cannot regard it as denying the existence of the objects called the round square even though the proposition of it not existing seems true, as if there were such an object it would exist. He felt that with sentences without a proper name; not a name directly representing some object, the sentence had to analysed first, so that the sentence is substituted to ‘it is false that there is an object x which is both round and square.

Russell believed that any genuine proper name must ‘directly represent some object’, but that not all apparent names were genuine names. He thought that Frege was wrong to treat ‘Aristotle’ and ‘the tutor of Alexander’ as the same symbol despite them both being a name with a sense and reference. He felt that if Aristotle was a genuine proper name it had a meaning solely by having a reference and did not have a sense and an expression like ‘the tutor of Alexander was not a name because it had parts that were symbols in their own right. This was his theory of definite descriptions. Russell analysed sentences in three elements. Using the sentence ‘the author of Hamlet was a genius’ he said that for the word ‘the’ to be used in the sentence there must have been only one author for it to be true.

(1)   The first element says that at least one individual wrote Hamlet and (2) at most one individual wrote Hamlet, (3) therefore the third part goes on to say that the unique individual was a genius.

This system of analysing the sentence applies when there is an actually object that answers to the definite description, but also when the description is without content.

Frege and Russell attempted to construct a language that would be a more precise instrument than normal language for the purposes of logic and mathematics, containing only expressions with a truth value. They felt that sentences without truth value would make deduction impossible. Russell’s analysis achieves the definiteness that he and Frege both looked for.