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What has been discussed up to now concerning Frege"s semantics was almost exclusively bound up with the relations of expressions to their sense and their reference. Of the latter, however, we have learned only that each sense can have only one reference, whereas each reference can correspond to various senses. Already in "On Sense and Reference" Frege distinguished a level of references from a level of thoughts and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, raised the latter to the status of a realm of sense. The conclusion of our work will deal with some final aspects of the mutual relations between sense and reference, i.e., between realm of sense and realm of reference. The necessity of reconsidering this question should be evident even to those who hold involvement with problems of semantics and especially with the "realms of reference" not only for dépassé but even for superfluous and senseless. It is of course true that the distinction between sense and reference plays a subordinate role in the construction of Frege"s logic in the Begriffsschrift; and in the Basic Laws, for example, it is invoked in only two places — once where the interpretation of arithmetic equality as identity is defended, and again where there is reference to the "content" of the sentences of the Begriffsschrift. But, as can be seen in the second part of this work, the conceptual pair "sense and reference" plays such a great role in the analysis of natural language that Carnap can call the use thereof the proper "method of semantic analysis" (MaN, 144). Finally, as the previous chapter indicated, Frege himself tried in his later works to anchor the logical laws themselves in the "realm of sense".

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2981-9_9

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