Günther Eder
Truth, Paradox, and the Procedural Conception of Fregean Sense
Abstract
In his seminal article On Sense and Reference, Frege introduced his famous distinction between sense and reference. While Frege’s notion of reference is relatively clear, the notion of sense was viewed with suspicion right from the beginning. The aims of this article are two-fold. First, I will motivate and discuss what I will call the procedural conception of Fregean sense, according to which senses are understood as procedures to determine referents. Senses of sentences, in particular, are identified with procedures to determine truth-values. Based on a formal explication of the procedural conception of sense proposed by John Horty, I will, secondly, give an outline of a theory of the semantic paradoxes and related semantic anomalies, drawing on the idea that paradoxical sentences correspond to sense-procedures that, because of their internal structure, fail to determine a truth value.Truth, Paradox, and the Procedural Conception of Fregean Sense