Philosophie und Beratung

Humboldt was aware of the fact that we understand a linguistic expression if we know under what conditions we can use it in order to reach an understanding about something in the world. It was Frege, though, who explained this internal relation of meaning and validity at the level of simple assertoric sentences. He starts out from sentences as the smallest linguistic units capable of being true or false. Thus, "truth" can serve as the basic semantic concept for explaining the meaning of linguistic expressions. The meaning of a sentence is determined precisely by the conditions under which the sentence is true (or that "make it true"). Wittgenstein, like Frege, conceives the sentence or proposition as an expression of its truth conditions: "To understand a proposition means to know what is the case if it is true." This opening move has a number of interesting implications.
If only sentences have a determinate meaning [Sinn] because they are the only form in which a state of affairs or a complete thought can be expressed, the meaning [Bedeutung] of individual words must be assessed in terms of their contribution to the construction of true sentences. But since the same words may serve as building blocks for quite different sentences, this "context principle" seems to suggest that all the expressions of language are interconnected by a complex web of semantic threads. Such a holistic conception of language, however, would jeopardize the semantic determinacy of individual sentences. Frege, therefore, at the same time defends a "principle of compositionality" according to which the meaning of a complex expression is composed of the meaning of its parts. The corresponding idea in Wittgenstein's Tractatus is that a logically transparent language fulfilling the exclusive function of representing facts must be constructed truth-functionally out of atomic propositions.
Another consequence that follows from the primacy of sentence over word (or of judgement over concept) is the rejection of the traditional view that linguistic symbols are essentially names for objects. Fregeanalyzessimplepropositionsonthemodelofmathematicalfunctionsthatcanbefulfilledwithdifferentvalues.Thisenableshimtoexplaintheinterplayoftwodifferentacts:predicationofproperties,ontheonehand,andreferencestoobjectstowhichthesepropertiesareattributed,ontheother.Andjustaspredicationmustnotbeassimilatedtoreference,sopredicatesorconceptsmustnotbeassimilatedtonames."Sense"[Sinn] must not be confused with "reference" [Referenz], nor propositional content with the act of referring [Bezugsnahme] to the object about which something is being said. Only on this condition is it possible for us to make different, perhaps contradictory assertions about the same object and to compare them with one another. If we were not capable of recognizing the identity of the same object under different descriptions, there could be neither cognitive advances nor revisions of languages and the "worlds" they semantically "disclose."