Joseph S. Fulda
Abstract
What exactly is the meaning of "meaning"? Until Frege's seminal paper in 1892, "Über Sinn und Bedeutung"---"On Sense and Reference"1---philosophers groped for an answer without much success. Frege's theory answered this question by observing that "H.G. Wells" has two sorts of meanings: reference, the man referred to, i.e., H.G. Wells himself, and sense, the meaning that H.G. Wells has for us, e.g., "The author of The War of the Worlds" and "The first true science fiction author." To Frege, every proper name has both a reference, also termed denotation, and one or more senses, also termed connotations. Various philosophical difficulties and paradoxes arise from the dichotomy of sense and reference, because neither aspect of meaning captures the other. Thus, reference does not capture the sense (one can know H.G. Wells without knowing that he authored The War of the Worlds), nor does sense capture reference (one can know that someone must have authored The War of the Worlds without knowing who), nor does one sense capture another (one can know that Wells wrote The War of the Worlds without knowing that many consider him the first true science fiction author). One paradox is that the substitutivity of identity fails. Thus it may be the case that Wells and the author of The War of the Worlds are identical, yet one can believe that the author of The War of the Worlds is the first true science fiction author without believing that Wells is the first true science fiction author, even though all that has been done is the substitution of identicals. There are also difficulties---not necessarily paradoxical---inherent in Frege's theory. For example, what is the reference for a fictional character in a play or novel? The philosophical literature on meaning, sense, and reference is vast, and we have but opened the door.
- 1. "Artificial Stupidity", The Economist, vol. 324, no. 7770, August 1, 1992.Google Scholar
- 2. A. Katz, "OBD: A Truth Maintaining Inference Engine implementeded in Ada", AI and Simulation, Society for Computer Simulation 1988, p. 188.Google Scholar
- 3. W. Lewis Johnson, "Needed: A New Test of Intelligence", SIGART Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 4, October 1992, Editorial and Commentary, p. 7. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 4. S. Harnad, "The Turing Test is not a Trick: Turing Indistinguishability is a Scientific Criterion", SIGART Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 4, October 1992, Editorial and Commentary, p. 9. Google ScholarDigital Library
- 5. S. C. Shapiro, "The Turing Test and the Economist", SIGART Bulletin, vol. 3, no. 4, October 1992, Editorial and Commentary, p. 10. Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- Computer-generated art, music, and literature: philosophical conundrums
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