If a sign for Frege is just an amalgam of its sense and reference...

If a sign for Frege is just an amalgam of its sense and reference, in what sense is a Fregean sign different from Saussure's signifier/signified?

Saussure saw the signifier psychologically – Frege's senses are abstract objects that aren't instantiated in any human mind – we merely 'grasp' them, sort of like Platonic forms.

The signifier is also part of the sign as such, whereas Frege's senses seem to exist independently of any particular sign, and signs in separate languages, or even perhaps separate signs in the same language (synonyms) might be able to share a sense.

gr8 post

re: the abstractness of senses... consider his example in On Sense and Reference of the telescope with the moon. The image through the telescope is the sense, the retina/eye is the idea. Everyone has a different idea of a thing. But we can all get the same sense from a word if we approach it correctly, its accessible in a very important and special way for Frege, which really helps connect him to Locke and enlightenment thinkers

>Frege's senses seem to exist independently of any particular sign

This is really confusing to me, and I get that's how he thought about it because he does, as you point out, say that different signs can share the same sense. But I have no idea how that could be the case, since he describes sense as "the mode of presentation" of a sign, which I don't see as anything other than its literal physical shape (IE. =ab has a different sense from =aa because =ab includes a different term [and is thus also a different sign]). What would be an example of a two different signs that share a sense?

Like two signs can share a reference and have dissimilar senses, which I guess is largely the point of Sense and Reference, but I don't see how dissimilar signs, with the identical or different references, can share a sense, or what a sign refers to other than a sense.

oh man I thought we were going to talk about Freegans, you know the vegans who only eat out of dumpsters

yeah and nowhere in that example does a "sign" occur - there's only the sense, reference, and the idea. I would have thought that the sign would correspond to the lens - this allows for the notion of an objective "sign" and an objective "sense" (since they're the same thing, except the latter also refers to the reference of the sense) and for the subjective associations someone might have with the sign. But if signs are supposed to be something other than the sense+reference, I don't really get where or how they fit.

I'm also kind of confused by the practical implications of Saussure's psychologism vs.Frege's Platonism, I think just because I don't really get how to understand Frege except in the signifier/signified sense.

>What would be an example of a two different signs that share a sense?

To answer my own question, the only thing I can think of is where two signs share senses but have different references, and the only instance I can conceive of that happening is where you allow for a psychological association with the sense to stand for its reference, which Frege certainly wouldn't allow.

if we take dog and 犬 to be different signs, according to Frege they're supposed to nonetheless have the same sense and reference. If that's the case, then why should "John Wilkes Booth" and "the man who shot Lincoln" have different senses, other than the fact that a person may not have psychologically associated the former with the latter or vice versa, since the trans-language example proves that its not a mere difference in sign that determines a difference in sense..

The word "Obama" is a sign. It has a reference and it also has a sense.

The sense and the reference are both
aspects of a sign.

Consider the word "Obama". When I say "Obama", I'm denoting (referencing) the human being Obama. When I say "The 44th POTUS", I am also denoting the same human being. Now, are "The 44th POTUS" and "Obama" the same thing? No, they differ in their sense.

The reference is objective, because it denotes something.

The sense is objective, because anyone can grasp the sense of a word. You can tell me the ways in which "The 44th POTUS" is a different mode of expression than "Obama".

Now consider entire expressions. What is the sense of "Obama passes laws."? It's the thought within the sentence. As a sense, the thought should be objective.

Of course, there is a subjective aspect of the sentence. That is my idea of the sentence

A sense doesn't have anything to do with the physical shape of a sign, but rather what it means. So for example 'The man who walks' and 'El hombre que camina' have the same sense (modulo difficulties of translation) because they mean the same thing.

The reason for distinguishing sense and reference is that two terms can mean different things but nonetheless pick out the same referent, as with 'Benjamin Franklin' and 'the inventor of the bifocals.' The latter picks out Benjamin Franklin just like the name does, but that's not what it means – it means that individual which invented the bifocals. That happens to be Franklin, but presents him in a specific way (one can grasp the meaning of the expression without knowing who fulfills the description).

Right, so the sense is objective in the same sense that a sign is objective, namely, that everyone can point out its sensible properties. My problem is that if a sign is nothing aside from a particular symbol composed of a sense and a reference, then I can't understand how two different signs can share the same sense.

>If that's the case, then why should "John Wilkes Booth" and "the man who shot Lincoln" have different senses, other than the fact that a person may not have psychologically associated the former with the latter or vice versa, since the trans-language example proves that its not a mere difference in sign that determines a difference in sense.

Well, sentences containing 'the man who shot Lincoln' don't mean the same thing as sentences containing 'John Wilkes Booth.'

You can see this in modal contexts, for example, we can say, "What if the man who shot Lincoln was John C. Beckenridge?" Does this mean the same thing as "What if John Wilkes Booth was John C. Beckenridge?" No – "John Wilkes Booth" refers to some man, and "the man who shot Lincoln" refers to whoever shot Lincoln. That happens to be Booth, but it might not have been.

Are "Jerusalem" and "Yerushalayim" the same sign?

They seem to have the same sense and the same reference

"Jerusalem" = "Yerushalayim" seems to be more trivial in a way than "Jerusalem" = "The Capital of Israel"

A sense doesn't have any sensible properties – it's an abstract object, a 'way' of pointing out the reference. A sign with sensible properties may convey a sense, and multiple signs with separate sensible properties may convey the same sense.

>"the mode of presentation" of a sign, which I don't see as anything other than its literal physical shape

this is confused; the sense of the sign is the mode of presentation of the sign's referent, not the sign. that is, the sense is the way that the referent is presented by the sign, not the way the sign presents itself.

so, if two different signs present their referent in the same way, then they have the same sense

Alright, I think I get it now.
The examples where two senses pick out the same object but predicate different properties of that object (x is benjamin franklin, x invented bifocals) make sense, since here the sense is the property predicated by the sign of its referent, and the same property can be predicated by different signs (camina/walks).

yes. also consider 2+2 = 5-1. Their reference is the same (the abstract particular 4) yet they are different senses (one is a sum, the other is a difference, et al)

Right, thanks for the explanation. So basically, Frege doesn't need to make any reference to how people understand signs to explain their semantic structure, since the sense of a term is not how it presents its reference "to a subject" but how it presents its reference "objectively", where objectively just means the logical relation between the sense of a term and its reference. I'm not sure how you get at that relation without reference to human psychology though. The fact that 2 + 2 and 5 - 1 are different senses seems knowable only insofar as human psychology recognizes them as different things. Though I guess this just a complaint with Platonism generally.

> where objectively just means the logical relation between the sense of a term and its reference

IE., that "The walking man" is satisfied iff the man is walking. I don't see where this relation exists other than in the fact that if I say "the walking man" to describe a sitting man I realize my statement is false.

and also, to go back to the telescope analogy: if the sense is the property predicated by the sign of its referent, how can Frege allow that the same sense can produce different ideas? For instance if I understand man to mean dog, and someone else understand man to mean homo sapiens, then I'll find the description of a dog as a man to be true whereas he'll find it false, making it seem as though the word has two senses because there are two different ideas associated with it.

He seems here to reduce objectivity to statistical consent on meaning - that is, "the" sense of man is homo sapiens because that's the norm for using the term. But doesn't that mean that human psychology determines sense on a collective scale?

What sense a word expresses is a matter of linguistic convention. What ideas it engenders in you is a matter of individual psychology.

But the sense itself is unchanging, and always determines the same reference depending on the way the world is. In your case, two separate people would take the same sign to be linked to distinct senses. Depending on how finely you individuate 'sign,' then, you might say either that they're using different signs that happen to have the same form, or that one of them is mistaken about what the sign means (in English, someone who thinks that 'man' means dog is just wrong – that's not what it means).