Indeed, the actor/character themselves, insofar as they express a ‘subject’, are a sense without a reference (in the manner that individual names have senses), thus, a representation. It would be frivolous to say this utterance is false on account of the fact that the actor merely intends to walk off of stage right and wait in the wings. So, when an actor on stage, in character, announces they are “going outside to take a walk” this is a sentence that has a sense which we grasp, but it does not have as its referent the circumstance of its being true (or false). If we name them, say, representations, the words of the actors on the stage would be representations indeed the actor himself would be a representation” (Frege, 1892a, p.42, fn) “It would be desirable to have a special term for signs having only a sense. For these, he suggests the term ‘representation’. Opposed to this are the senses of declarative sentences that do not have as their reference a truth value (they do not partake of truth and falsity). “When one apprehends or thinks a thought one does not create it but only comes to stand in a certain relation, which is different from seeing a thing or having an idea, to what already existed beforehand.” (ibid, fn) “Thus the thought, for example, which we expressed in the Pythagorean theorem is timelessly true, true independently of whether anyone takes it to be true. These ‘thoughts’ are not produced, or formed, by those that would ‘apprehend’ them, but rather exist eternally (the true as much as the false), ambivalent to whether they are entertained, or not, by anybody. Thus, it seems worthwhile to delimit an object which is the ‘ that to which truth and falsity is rightly ascribed’. This seems fair enough the world itself is not something of which we can say it is true or false, and the same with many grammatically, or pragmatically, sound utterances as well (questions, for example). This is to say that ‘thoughts’ (and only ‘thoughts’, thus defined) are what partake of truth and falsity. To fix the terms, for Frege the term ‘thought’ is reserved for a sense of a declarative sentence that has as its referent a truth value (Frege, 1918, p.292). It’s this distinction I want to explore here, arguing that Frege ends up in a groundless circle when we ask how to determine this distinction, and that Foucault, in the Archaeology of Knowledge, is unexpectedly covering this same terrain, and providing a solution. On the back of sense, which was discovered as the mode of presentation of a name, Frege begins thinking about the sense of sentences, making a distinction between the senses of sentences that can be true or false and the senses of sentence that can’t be either (for example, the sentences of literature). What I am interested in here is what Frege does next, after he has discovered this entity, ‘sense’. I wrote on this latter difference in an article in December. The latter is needed because Frege wants to account for the cognitive significance of sentences of the form ‘a = b’, as opposed to sentences of the form ‘a = a’, despite these sentences seemingly saying the same thing if the first is true. Frege needs a ‘something’ that different speakers can communally grasp, such that debates concerning the truth and falsity of various propositions have a singular, common ground. The former is needed because there exists a diversity between the ideas of different users of language, and language possesses a near infinite ability to vary expression. Frege posits the existence of sense on the basis of needing to have some entity that can produce an identity within a seeming diversity, and diversity over seeming identities.
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