PHIL 2504 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Pythagorean Theorem, Linguistic Turn, Analytic Philosophy
27 Feb 2018
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Frege and the linguistic turn : some historical context. Frege (1848-1925) worked primarily in logic and philosophy of math, but arguably made his greatest impact in philosophy of language. Frege"s time is sometimes referred to as the linguistic turn in philosophy, when understanding language became central to understanding our experience in and representations of the world. Frege and his contemporaries, like russell, carnap, and wittgenstein, had profound influences on the content and direction of philosophy of language and analytic philosophy more broadly. Frege"s key contribution was his insight into the problems with a referential theory of meaning and how these problems created puzzles. Frege resolved these puzzles with a distinction between two semantic aspects of a linguistic expression: sense and reference/denotation. Serious problems arise if the only semantic aspect of an expression is its reference. Rather, every expression both denotes and has a particular way of denoting.
