7 - Reference, sense and denotation

Summary

Introductory

In the first chapter of this book it was pointed out that the word ‘meaning’ had a number of distinguishable, but perhaps related, senses. Subsequently we drew a broad distinction between three kinds of meaning signalled by language: descriptive, social and expressive (2.4). In chapter 3 we saw that languages may be unique among natural semiotic systems in their capacity to transmit descriptive, as well as social and expressive, information. In this, as in the previous chapter, we shall be concerned solely with descriptive meaning.

Distinctions of the kind we shall be discussing have been drawn by many philosophers, but they have been drawn in a variety of ways. It is now customary, as we shall see, to draw a twofold distinction between what we will call sense* and reference*. Other terms used for the same, or at least a similar, contrast are: ‘meaning’ and ‘reference’ (where ‘meaning’ is given a narrower interpretation than it bears as an everyday p re-theoretical term); ‘connotation’ and ‘denotation’; ‘intension’ and ‘extension’.

No attempt will be made to compare systematically the usage of different authors. But it may be helpful to point out one or two of the terminological pitfalls for the benefit of readers who are not already familiar with the various senses in which the terms mentioned above are employed in the literature. The term ‘reference’, as we shall define it below, has to do with the relationship which holds between an expression and what that expression stands for on particular occasions of its utterance.