Frege's Notion of Sense and Reference
Frege, in his paper "On Sense and Reference" clearly points out that 'sense' is the first and foremost criterion for having a meaningful sentence. Sense is the thought which is expressed in a sentence. So, it helps to get the reference of a proposition. Sense is always logically prior to reference. In order to refer to something we must understand the meaning of a word or a sentence that it stands for. Thus, sense is the medium through which we refer to something. For Frege, reference of a sentence is nothing but the truth-value of that sentence. A sentence possesses meaning implies that it can be judged as either true or false.1 In this connection, we should keep in our mind that Frege is not interested in psychological issues concerning meaning. His primary interest lies with the issues concerning the empirical world.
Let us consider the sentence, "The grass is green". Since it is an atomic sentence it does not require any further sentence to establish its truth-value. It is so, because atomistic sentences are self-sufficient and self-evident for establishing their truth-value.
| 1 | These two concepts, one is, reference of a sentence is same as truth-value of that sentence and another is, meaningful sentences can be judged as either true or false, are borrowed from Perry,J. (1977). Frege on Demonstratives. The Philosophical Review, 86 (4), 474-497. |