Frege, Russell, and Analytic Philosophy of Language

The Birth of Philosophy of Language

Gottlob Frege (1848–1925) is the “father of analytic philosophy” and modern logic. His central question: how can mathematical statements (“2+2=4”) be necessarily true and not accidental? The answer required developing formal logic and a theory of meaning.

Frege introduced the distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung) of an expression. The reference is the object to which the expression refers. The sense is the way in which this object is presented. “The Morning Star” and “The Evening Star” have the same reference (the planet Venus), but different senses: they present the same object in different ways. Therefore, the statement “The Morning Star = The Evening Star” is informative (an astronomical discovery), whereas “Venus = Venus” is a trivial tautology.

This distinction solves many philosophical puzzles: how can statements about non-existent objects be true? (“The present king of France is bald”—this sentence has sense, but no reference). How do proper names work in reports of opinions? (“She thinks that Hesperus is a star”—replacing Hesperus with Phosphorus can change the truth value, although they refer to the same object).

Russell: Theory of Descriptions

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) in “On Denoting” (1905) proposed a revolutionary solution to the problem of names and descriptions—one of the most elegant ideas in analytic philosophy.

The problem: how does “The present king of France is bald” work, if the present king of France does not exist? There are three answers: (1) the proposition is meaningless; (2) it refers to something non-existent (Meinong: there are “objects” which do not have being); (3) it is false.

Russell chooses (3) through logical analysis. The phrase “The present king of France” is not a name, but a description that must be analyzed: “There exists x, such that x is the unique present king of France, and x is bald.” This statement is false (there is no such x), not meaningless or denoting the nonexistent.

The method of logical analysis—breaking down the surface grammar of a sentence into its logical form—became the standard tool of analytic philosophy. Many philosophical problems, Russell claimed, arise because we incorrectly interpret surface grammar as the logical form.

Early Wittgenstein: “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus”

Ludwig Wittgenstein in the “Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus” (1921) created one of the most ambitious theories of language: the picture theory.

Language operates by “drawing” facts. A proposition is a logical picture of a fact: the elements of the proposition correspond to objects of the fact, the structure of the proposition reflects the structure of the fact. “The cat sits on the mat” is true if the cat really sits on the mat—the proposition “shows” how things are.

Consequence: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” (the concluding statement of the “Tractatus”). Ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics—everything that is not a description of facts—is “meaningless” in the strict sense. There cannot be correctly formed propositions about what is good, beautiful, the meaning of life—because there are no facts which they could “picture.”

This is an extremely radical position. Wittgenstein himself admitted that the propositions of the “Tractatus,” explaining the picture theory, too are “meaningless”—they are a ladder that must be thrown away after climbing it.