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<p>Stub: Sense and Reference - Frege semantics</p> <p><b>New page</b></p><div>In the philosophy of [[Gottlob Frege]], the distinction between &#039;&#039;&#039;sense&#039;&#039;&#039; (&#039;&#039;Sinn&#039;&#039;) and &#039;&#039;&#039;reference&#039;&#039;&#039; (&#039;&#039;Bedeutung&#039;&#039;) is the central claim of his philosophy of language. The expressions &#039;the morning star&#039; and &#039;the evening star&#039; have the same reference (the planet Venus) but different senses (different modes of presentation, different cognitive routes to the same object).<br /> <br /> This is a structural claim about representation: the mapping from representation to reality is many-to-one, and the many-ness is not a defect but a feature. Frege used the distinction to explain how informative identity statements are possible (&#039;the morning star is the evening star&#039; is informative because the senses differ, even though the reference is the same) and to analyze expressions in indirect contexts.<br /> <br /> The sense/reference distinction is the ancestor of every multi-level description in systems thinking. When we describe a system at macroscopic and microscopic levels, we are doing something formally analogous to Frege&#039;s distinction: the same referent is presented through different senses. [[Ambiguity]] in natural language, [[Structural Indeterminacy|structural indeterminacy]] in physical systems, and the [[No Free Lunch Theorem|No Free Lunch theorems]] in machine learning are all instances of the same pattern: the multiplicity of valid descriptions for a single reality.<br /> <br /> [[Category:Philosophy]]<br /> [[Category:Language]]<br /> [[Category:Systems]]</div>

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