Thursday, October 17, 2013

The Morning Star and the Evening Star

Fregean Philosophy of Language offers a theory of Semantics, i. e. the thesis that a Proposition has both a 'Reference' and a 'Sense', as a solution to the problem, 'How is the proposition "The Morning Star is the Evening Star" informative'?  Now, since it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which the utterance of that proposition is not stilted, at best, it is equally difficult to not classify that question as what some of the school's practitioners call a 'pseudo-problem', based on an analytical contrivance, not on an exemplary case.  Regardless, that the proposition is conceived as 'informative', is a tip-off as to its implicit purposive character, and, hence, that it is an abbreviation of "Consider that the Morning Star and the Evening Star are one and the same', which might be uttered as a means to stimulating further interest in Astronomy.  Hence, the school's concept of 'Proposition' is derived from that of 'Proposal'.  Likewise, the central thesis of the doctrine, the proposition 'A Proposition has both a Reference and a Sense', abbreviates the proposal 'Consider that a Proposition has both a Reference and a Sense', which exposes the inapplicability of the thesis to discourse about it.  So, Fregean Philosophy of Language is self-falsifying, a difficulty which, as has been previously discussed, the introduction of a 'Meta-linguistic' device either confirms, or compounds, perhaps infinitely, as has been previously discussed.

No comments:

Post a Comment