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CHURCH’S AND GÖDEL’S SLINGSHOT ARGUMENTS
Ruffino, Marco
Ruffino, Marco
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Abstract
The idea that sentences are semantically analogous to proper names is advocated by Frege in two of his classical papers, “Funktion und Begriff” (1891) and “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” (1892). Actually, Frege holds three controversial (and independent) claims in these articles. First, that sentences behave semantically like proper names. Second, that although some sentences merely express a sense (or a thought, like, e.g., ‘Pegasus is flying over Rio de Janeiro’), some of them (those employed in scientific contexts) also have a reference. And, third, that if a sentence refers at all, its reference is the corresponding truth-value. Each one of these claims (and the corresponding argument offered by Frege) has been the subject of much discussion in the philosophical literature; in this paper I shall be focussing only on the arguments offered for the third claim. Frege’s argument in “Über Sinn und Bedeutung” is based on the connection between the semantic value of terms constitutive of sentences and the value that these are said to have in scientific contexts, namely, they have value only if they are true or false. Since truth or falsity are that feature of sentences that drives our attention from the sense to the reference of their constitutive expressions, and since the reference of the parts of the sentence are supposed to build up the reference of the whole sentence, Frege concludes that we should take as reference of a sentence the corresponding truth-value.
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2004
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With permission of the license/copyright holder