Some notes on Saussure and Frege

Saussure

For Saussure’s structuralism, a sign has two components: a “sound-image” or pattern of mere sound (called the signifier) and a “concept” or image (called the signified).  The connection between the particular signifier and the particular signified is itself completely arbitrary, as is shown by the variety of words with which I can communicate the same concept in different languages.  The system of language itself, though, is a system of the relations of signifiers.  If I explain the meaning of a word to you, or explain to you what I mean by a particular word, I can only give you more signifiers; I can never guarantee that they evoke the same signified.  Thus language, as it is spoken, is a linear chain of signifiers, each one following from the last in the order spoken and each relating to others as a matter of definition and context.  Language itself, Saussure suggests, can be thought of as this purely relational system of differences.

This picture formed the basis for the analytic work of “structuralist” philosophers, anthropologists, and psychologists throughout the middle part of the twentieth century, including the literary theorist Roland Barthes, the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, and the Freudian psychoanalyst and philosopher Jacques Lacan.  The “archeology of knowledge” undertaken by the philosopher Michel Foucault itself applies some “structuralist” terms of analysis, while also seeking to problematize and extend them.  A more radical critique of the linguistic theory of structuralism comes from the theory and practice of “deconstruction,” invented by Jacques Derrida.  We have seen that the origin of the idea of deconstruction is Heidegger’s “Destruktion” or de-structuring of the tradition of ontology or metaphysics.  Derrida picks up this project of de-structuring, bringing its theory to a greater level of explicitness as he deconstructively “reads” philosophical and literary texts.  Because a large part of the practice of deconstruction depends on its complication and partial rejection of structuralism, we can understand it by considering the application of the Heideggerian critique to the structuralist picture of Saussure.

Frege

The article “On Sense and Reference” has long been considered a classic in analytic philosophy, not only because it inaugurates a way of thinking about meaning that has run through the tradition but because its analytic consideration of the nature of meaning is a general model for the way that analytic philosophers have tended to confront problems.  In encountering the article, we are considering the questions: “What is the meaning of a word?” and “What is the meaning of a sentence?”  We might give various answers.  We might think, for instance, that the meaning of a word is the object that it stands for: for instance, the meaning of “The moon” would just be the moon.  But there are lots of words that seem to be meaningful, but don’t stand for anything that we can find in the world or point to.  Consider, for instance, “Pegasus” and “two.”  Clearly, if we want to say that part of the meaning of a word is the thing it stands for, we have to say more as well: we have to supplement our account to handle terms that do not obviously stand for anything but still have a meaning.

Another reason for supplementing, or dividing, our account of meaning comes from considerations about judgments of equality or identity.  Language is full of judgments of identity; we very often say that one thing is another, and it can be important to find out that this is true.  Consider, for instance, the judgment:

A: Clark Kent is Superman.

This is clearly not an obvious truth; when somebody finds it out, they know something that they didn’t know before.  But if we thought that the meaning of a word is just the thing that it stands for, this would be mysterious.  The judgment “Clark Kent is Superman” would mean the same as

B: Superman is Superman. 

Since both “Clark Kent” and “Superman” mean the same person, the judgment “Clark Kent is Superman” would seem to just say that that person is that person.  But this is something that everybody knows!  If we want to explain how (A)  can be a different judgment from B, we have to distinguish something else in the meaning of a word, besides just what the word stands for. 

We have to distinguish, in other words, between the reference (Bedeutung) of a word – what it stands for – and the sense (Sinn).  Both “Superman” and “Clark Kent” have the same reference: they refer to the same individual.  But they have different senses.  When we make judgment (A), we are referring to the same thing using two different senses.  When we find out that (A) is true, we find out that these two senses do indeed have the same reference.  But we might not know this initially; if we just know the terms “Clark Kent” and “Superman,” we know how to refer to this person two different ways, but we don’t know that it’s the same person we’re referring to.

With the sense/reference distinction drawn, we can also handle cases of senses with no reference.  For instance the terms “Pegasus” and “The King of France” have senses – we know what they mean – but they don’t refer to anything.  We can specify the sense, and even say things about what would be true of the reference if there were one, even though in fact there is not.  In fact, Frege thinks that cases of sense without reference are a drawback of ordinary language that we could avoid if we could change it to a “logically perfect” language. 

Turning back to Frege’s three-world picture, we can now see how to locate senses and references within it.  With one kind of exception, which we’ll discuss in a minute, references are in the first world, the world of physical objects.  This is the world that includes the moon, people, and everything else that exists in space and time.  But senses are not in the first world: they are not objects in space and time.  Nor are they in the second world, the world of subjective contents of consciousness:

“In the light of this, one need have no scruples in speaking simply of the sense, whereas in the case of an idea one must, strictly speaking, add to whom it belongs and at what time.  It might perhaps be said: Just as one man connects this idea, and another that idea, with the same word,  so also one man can associate this sense and another that sense.  But there still remains a difference in the mode of connexion.  They are not prevented from grasping the same sense; but they cannot have the same idea … If two person picture the same thing, each still has his own idea …” (p. 9)

The sense of the term “Pegasus,” for instance, isn’t just what you or I decide to mean by it: it’s what the word means for all of us.  We can agree or disagree about what it means, and there is a right and wrong answer about what it means, even though it doesn’t have a reference.  Senses, therefore, must be in the third world or realm: the realm of objective contents.  Like the thoughts behind sentences, they are eternal and unchanging, and somehow our “grasping” of them explains our ability to use words meaningfully.

Thinking about senses might help us to get clear on the nature of thoughts and constituents of the third realm generally.  Frege holds that sense determines reference: for every sense, there is at most one reference.  We can have two senses that pick out the same reference, but never two references from the same sense.  So we can say that understanding a word – knowing its sense – means knowing how to go from the word to a reference: knowing which thing it picks out, if it picks out any. 

Frege thinks something similar is true, as well, of the senses of whole sentences.  The senses of whole sentences are the thoughts or contents they express, and we can think of the sense of a sentence as being made up of the senses of the terms within it.  But what is the reference of a sentence?  It doesn’t seem that the reference of a sentence – say, “the cat is on the mat” – is any object; the sentence doesn’t refer to the cat, or the mat, or to the way that they’re connected, but really to all of these.  In thinking about the reference of a sentence, though, Frege again holds to the model that sense determines reference.  The sense of the sentence determines, in particular, whether the sentence as a whole is true or false.  Accordingly, Frege holds that the reference of a sentence is one of two “truth-values,” the True and the False:

“We are therefore driven into accepting the truth value of a sentence as constituting its reference.  By the truth value of a sentence I understand the circumstance that it is true or false.  There are no further truth values.  For brevity I call the one the True, the other the False.  Every declarative sentence concerned with the reference of its words is therefore to be regarded as a proper name, and its reference, if it has one, is either the True or the False.”  (p. 10).

Just as understanding a word is going from its sense to its reference, judging a sentence is going from its sense to its truth-value, finding out whether it is true or false.  In both kinds of case, the reference is completely determined by the sense: we could not have another reference, given the particular sense that the word or sentence has. 

Putting the picture together, then, Frege seems to hold that it is essential to our ability to speak meaningful language at all that we be able to grasp senses, that we be in constant relation to the Third Realm of ideal, objective contents.  These contents, remember, do not change at all according to whether we grasp them or not: they retain an austere indifference to our own purposes and needs.  Nevertheless, there is an interesting ambiguity in Frege’s discussion of the nature of senses and thoughts.  Even though the senses of words never change and have nothing to do with what we do, we are supposed to understand grasping the sense as having a certain kind of ability: the ability to go from the word to the reference (in the case of word-senses) or from the sentence to the truth-value (in the case of sentence-senses).  So it looks like even though senses themselves have nothing to do with what we can do, grasping  a sense means, precisely, being able to do something.