Sense and Reference
We maintain that the meaning of a concept consists in the interrelation of two constitutive parts, sense and reference. These terms have been explicitly introduced in modern philosophical vocabulary by Frege,[13] but the corresponding notions have existed in the Western tradition since ancient and medieval philosophy under different denominations, and have been submitted to careful and subtle analyses.
What was lost in certain trends of modern philosophy that were most directly influenced by empiricism was the awareness of the existence and specificity of an intellectual world of thoughts in which the sense of concepts has its place, and is not reducible to a dynamics of sensible perceptions (though having links with them). When the “linguistic turn” occurred in contemporary philosophy, a comfortable replacement for the embarrassing notion of a thought-content seemed to be offered: the sense of a term or a linguistic expression in general is determined by its linguistic context and in such a way is totally internal not only to language, but even to any particular language context. This “semantic holism” paradigmatically advocated by Quine was also a barrier regarding the access to a reality different from language and, therefore, did not leave room for reference in any proper sense. According to this position, meaning was reduced to sense, and sense was understood as the result of a linguistic context.The genuine spirit of empiricism, however, pointed toward a different direction. Though sharing the elimination of the world of thought by simply considering language, the question regarding the meaning of a linguistic expression received a different answer: this meaning is what this linguistic expression is about, or denotes, that is, something that lies outside of the language itself and must be attained by sensible experience.
In other words, in this case meaning was reduced to reference. The gigantic difficulty in this position regarded how to establish the proper link between a linguistic expression and “its” referent without resorting to an intellectual sense, since logical-linguistic machineries (starting with Carnap's “correspondence “rules”) still remain of a linguistic nature and cannot provide the tools for overstepping the linguistic barrier.The weakness of both positions was the pretension to dispense with the specific dimension and role of thought: even admitting that language is in a way primary (because it is impossible to formulate, articulate and communicate thoughts without some kind of language), it remains clear that any language is in itself a pure set of material signs. This set becomes a language only if the signs are endowed with a meaning, that is, if they can be understood, and this very word directly calls into play the understanding (that is also called intellect), while we can call concepts in a very general sense the result of this understanding (since they are what we “conceive” when we understand the language). It is true that the linguistic context greatly contributes to the determination of meaning; not, however, because of the changing arrangement of the material signs of the language, but because of the intellectual interrelations among the various conceptual components of the context. By this we have recognized the merits of the ‘contextualist' theories of meaning, but at the same time we have also recognized that they tacitly rely upon the admission of a specific realm of thoughts, which we can equate with the domain of sense, Yet, if we remain at this stage, we are unable to explain how the language can speak about something different from itself (or, to put it in colloquial terms, about “the world”).
Equally frustrating is the effort of granting such a link between language and world by a direct assignment of constituents of the world to constituents of the language, since in this case one had to make an association of material entities (the signs of the language) with other material entities (the things of the world) without any reason for the choice.
If we admit, instead, that the signs of the language have a meaning, and that this meaning has also certain recognizable relations with the world, it is possible also to assign referents to the signs of the language and to know “about what” it is speaking. Therefore, even this reduction of meaning to reference cannot function without admitting the ‘intermediate' level of thought-contents, of concepts. As a consequence, if we accept to define semantics as the theory regarding the meaning of a language, we should advocate a three-level semantics, in which we envisage the level of signs (language), the level of sense (concepts) and the level of reference (the entities about which the language intends to speak).[14]As we have already explained, operations play an essential role in this framework, because they provide the missing link between the level of sense and the level of reference, and they can do this because, on the one hand, they are understood, i.e. conceptualized as a part of the sense of a proposition, but on the other hand they belong to the “world”, they consist in doing something and not just in speaking or thinking.
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