Which scenario best illustrates Frege's distinction between sense and reference?
ATwo different speakers have different mental images when they hear 'Venus' — showing that meaning varies by individual psychology
B'The morning star' and 'the evening star' refer to the same planet but present it via different modes — explaining why learning they pick out the same object is genuinely informative
C'Venus' and 'planet' have different references, showing that different words pick out different objects
DThe word 'Venus' has both a sound (Sinn) and a planet it refers to (Bedeutung)
Option B captures the core of Frege's theory: two expressions share the same reference (Venus) but have different senses (modes of presentation), which explains why the identity 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is informative rather than trivially true. Option A is the view Frege explicitly rejected — sense is objective and public, not individual psychology. Option D confuses sound/form with sense.
Question 2 Multiple Choice
According to Frege, what is the reference of a declarative sentence?
AThe thought or proposition the sentence expresses
BThe objects named by the nouns in the sentence
CIts truth value — True or False
DThe speaker's communicative intention in uttering it
Frege extended the sense/reference distinction to whole sentences: the sense of a sentence is the thought (proposition) it expresses, while the reference is its truth value. Two sentences can express different thoughts but have the same reference (both true, or both false). This architecture — sense determines reference at every level — is foundational to formal semantic theory.
Question 3 True / False
On Frege's view, 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' is informative in a way that 'Hesperus is Hesperus' is not, even though both sentences are true.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: True
This is Frege's central motivating puzzle. Both names refer to Venus, yet the first sentence ('Hesperus is Hesperus') is a trivial logical truth knowable without any empirical investigation, while 'Hesperus is Phosphorus' was a genuine astronomical discovery. Frege explains this by appeal to sense: the two names have different modes of presentation, so the identity statement makes a non-trivial claim about the world.
Question 4 True / False
For Frege, the sense of a term is the set of beliefs or mental images that an individual speaker associates with it when using the word.
TTrue
FFalse
Answer: False
Frege explicitly held that sense is objective and public — it belongs to the language, not to individual psychology. Two competent speakers using the same expression share the same sense even if their private mental associations differ. This objectivity is essential to Frege's project: if sense were merely psychological, there would be no basis for saying speakers communicate the same thought.
Question 5 Short Answer
Explain why a pure reference theory of meaning — where the meaning of a name just is its referent — cannot account for the informativeness of 'Hesperus is Phosphorus.' How does Frege's sense/reference distinction solve this problem?
Think about your answer, then reveal below.
Model answer: On a pure reference theory, 'Hesperus' and 'Phosphorus' both refer to Venus, so the sentence expresses the same thing as 'Venus is Venus' — a trivial logical truth. But that misses the cognitive significance: the identity was a genuine discovery. Frege solves this by introducing sense as the mode of presentation. The two names have different senses (one presents Venus as the evening star, the other as the morning star), so the identity claims that two distinct modes of presentation lead to the same object — a non-trivial, empirically discoverable fact.
The key move is that identity statements are not just about objects but about how those objects are presented. Informative identity statements connect two different conceptual routes to the same destination. This is why sense must be distinguished from reference: reference alone cannot explain cognitive significance.