Editing Gottlob Frege (section)

== Sense and reference ==
{{Main|Sense and reference}}
Frege's 1892 paper, "[[On Sense and Reference]]" ("Über Sinn und Bedeutung"), introduced his influential distinction between ''sense'' ("Sinn") and ''reference'' ("Bedeutung", which has also been translated as "meaning", or "denotation"). While conventional accounts of meaning took expressions to have just one feature (reference), Frege introduced the view that expressions have two different aspects of significance: their sense and their reference.

''Reference'' (or "Bedeutung") applied to [[proper names]], where a given expression (say the expression "Tom") simply refers to the entity bearing the name (the person named Tom). Frege also held that propositions had a referential relationship with their truth-value (in other words, a statement "refers" to the truth-value it takes). By contrast, the ''sense'' (or "Sinn") associated with a complete sentence is the thought it expresses. The sense of an expression is said to be the "mode of presentation" of the item referred to, and there can be multiple modes of representation for the same referent.

The distinction can be illustrated thus: In their ordinary uses, the name "Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor", which for logical purposes is an unanalysable whole, and the functional expression "the King of the United Kingdom", which contains the significant parts "the King of ξ" and "United Kingdom", have the same ''referent'', namely, the person best known as [[Charles III|King Charles III]]. But the ''sense'' of the word "[[United Kingdom]]" is a part of the sense of the latter expression, but no part of the sense of the "full name" of King Charles.

These distinctions were disputed by Bertrand Russell, especially in his paper "[[On Denoting]]"; the controversy has continued into the present, fueled especially by [[Saul Kripke]]'s famous lectures "[[Naming and Necessity]]".