Questions on Frege's "Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung"

  1. What does Frege mean by "a proper name"? Give several different examples of Fregean proper names.

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  2. Does Frege hold that 'the teacher of Alexander the Great and the pupil of Plato' specifies the--or a--sense of 'Aristotle'? If not, why not? If so, what happens to the sentence 'Aristotle was the teacher of Alexander the Great'?

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  3. What is the reference of the phrase 'the author of the Nichomachean Ethics' in (a) 'Aristotle was the author of the Nichomachean Ethics' and in (b) '"The author of the Nichomachean Ethics" contains six words'?

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  4. What is the reference of the words 'the author of the Nichomachean Ethics was also the author of the Prior Analytics' in (a) 'Peter said, "The author of the Nichomachean Ethics was also the author of the Prior Analytics"' and in (b) 'Peter said that the author of the Nichomachean Ethics was also the author of the Prior Analytics'?

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  5. In indirect discourse the sense of a sentence is the reference of the dependent clause it becomes. Does this mean that senses of sentences (at least in such contexts) are objects?

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  6. What is the difference between the sense and/or reference of a sign and its "associated ideas"? Give at least one illustration.

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  7. Why must a thought contained in or expressed by a sentence be its sense rather than its reference?

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  8. Consider the sentence: 'Plato was a descendent of the god Apollo.' Is this true? False? Neither? Explain. What about the sentence: 'Aristotle is a prime number'?

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  9. Why does Frege hold that the reference of a sentence (if it has one) is its truth-value?

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  10. Why can't the relation of the thought (the sense of a sentence) to the True be compared with that of a subject to predicate, as appears to be the case in 'The thought that Aristotle was the pupil of Plato is true'?

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  11. What is the reference of the subordinate clause in 'Peter said that Alexander the Great died in 325 B.C.E.'? What is the sense of that subordinate clause?

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  12. Frege says, "The truth-value of a sentence containing another as part [except where the part is directly or indirectly quoted] must remain unchanged when the part is replaced by another sentence having the same truth-value." Give a couple of illustrations.

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  13. Is the sentence 'Copernicus believed that the planetary orbits are circular' made false by the fact that it is false that the planetary orbits are circular? Why or why not?

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  14. Consider the sentence: 'Paula doubts that Plato wrote the Epinomis.' If we substitute 'the author of the Republic' for 'Plato' why might this change the truth-value of the whole?

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  15. Why does the sense of the sentence 'Whoever discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits died in misery' not contain as a part the thought that the phrase 'whoever discovered the elliptic form of the planetary orbits' designates an object?

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  16. According to Frege, what difference is there between (a) 'If an animal has lungs, it has a liver' and (b) 'If Fido has lungs, Fido has a liver'?

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  17. Does the following sentence express only one thought, or two? And what is its truth-value? 'George W. Bush, who fought at the battle of Waterloo, was elected President of the United States in 2000.'

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  18. In the sentence, 'Snell discovered that the ratio of the sine of the angle of incidence of a ray of light to the sine of the angle of refraction is a constant for any pair of media,' can the subordinate clause ('that the ratio of…etc.') be replaced by another of equal truth-value without changing the truth-value of the whole? Explain.

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  19. What is the reference of 'the negation of the thought that 3 is greater than 5'?

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  20. In the sentence 'Every husband has a wife' does the word 'every' have a reference? If so, what is it? If not, how can the sentence as a whole have one? Repeat for each word in the sentence. (Hint: it might help you answer this if you put the sentence into logical notation.)