The Next Best Thing to Sense in Begriffsschrift

Abstract

“On Sense and Reference” begins with a famous question about identity, or “equality”, Gleichheit, as Frege calls it. Is identity a relation? Is it a relation between objects or signs for objects? If it is a relation between objects, how can identity statements be informatively true or false rather than trivially and evidently true or false? We know what comes next. Frege goes on to distinguish sense from reference, and to apply the theory in outline to a range of questions in the philosophy of language. We know that in “On Sense and Reference” itself, he is concerned with the sense/reference distinction as applied to names of objects only, clauses or names of truth-values being a special case. In the posthumous Ausführungen über Sinn Und Bedeutung Qand in his correspondence with Husserl about the matter, he expands in greater detail on the sense and reference of concept words. Why, though, did he begin with identity? Knowing that Frege rarely did something without a good reason, we must suppose that identity is either very important theoretically for him, or that it was didactically a good place to start in introducing sense and reference. I think that in fact both considerations apply. Didactically, identity is an excellent place to begin considering the sense/reference distinction, because it is so obvious that some identities are self-evident and others are not. Identity clauses, apart from what to us now seems like their obvious importance, were important to Frege for many reasons, not least because of their crucial role in his logicism.