“Sentences represent the world because they are made up of words and phrases that stand for objects, events, concepts and properties. Since meaning is representational, it may seem that what these expressions stand for (refer to) is what they mean.” How do you resolve the puzzle created by the fore-going co-referential terms are introduced in a sentence?

“Sentences represent the world because they are made up of words and phrases that stand for objects, events, concepts and properties. Since meaning is representational, it may seem that what these expressions stand for (refer to) is what they mean.” How do you resolve the puzzle created by the fore-going co-referential terms are introduced in a sentence?

Referential theory of meaning elicits from the conception that proper names are the exemplified units of meaning. As such, any meaningful word must name, designate, refer to, or stand for something other than itself: words have meaning in the simple sense that they are symbols that are used for expression, and sentences are derived through combination of these words. Each word has a physical object. For such word to be meaningful, it must stand for or refer to physical objects.

Referential theory holds that a term is meaningful if it stands for an object, that terms which stand for the same object have the same meaning since the meaning of a term is simply the object for which it stands. It states that an expression means what it refers.

The quote leads to a problem known as ‘Frege’s puzzle’ which led him to distinguish meaning from reference. The puzzle involves explaining why substitution of co-referential terms in a sentence sometimes changes meaning. If we take an example of the statements ‘hesperus is phospherus’ and ‘phospherus is hesperus’; they are constructed from co-referential parts. Even though they may seem similar, Gotlob Frege will argue that there are sunstantive difference, i.e A=A and A=B are obviously statements of differing cognitive value. According to him, A=A holds a priori while the statement A=B often contains very valuable extension of our knowledge and cannot always be established a priori. And so because referentialism cannot account for this evident fact about meaning, it is untenable and a new view is needed.

The only way to account that the co-referential terms mean the same thing is in terms of sense else we will not be able to account sameness in meaning. The notion of sense was used by Frege in terms of potential informational value.