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Sense and psychology

المؤلف:  Nick Riemer

المصدر:  Introducing Semantics

الجزء والصفحة:  C3-P94

2026-04-26

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Sense and psychology

Before leaving Frege, it is important to emphasize the theoretical status of the concept of sense. Sense should not be identified simply with the pretheoretical term meaning; rather, it is a quite specific way of thinking about the cognitive effect of words, which contrasts strongly in a number of ways with the term meaning. One aspect of Fregean sense in particular may appear somewhat surprising for people who, like most linguists, are accustomed to thinking about meanings psychologically – as, in other words, private mental entities. One of the cornerstones of Frege’s whole approach to philosophy was the rejection of the interpretation of the meaning of a linguistic expression as a private psychological entity of any sort whatsoever. In his philosophy of mathematics, he similarly rejected any attempt to reduce the meaning of mathematical terms to mental entities. Fregean sense is thus not to be confused with the subjective, individual ideas or mental images which an earlier philosophical tradition derived from Aristotle and Locke, and many people today, think of as constituting the meanings of lexical items. Even though senses are things which we grasp mentally, they are not private ideas or mental images. The sense of an expression is a part of a thought; and thoughts, for Frege, are not subjective entities which vary from one individual to another. Instead, thoughts are objective but intangible entities, and it is this objective character which guarantees that people may talk about the same thing. Thus, while we often informally say that two people have different concepts of something (honesty, a good time, etc.), and are inclined to extend this way of thinking to word meanings, this sort of move is incompatible with the Fregean theory of sense. Senses – objective, shared, non-private modes of presentation – do not differ from one person to another.