ABSTRACT
A distinction fundamental to the philosophy of language is that between sign and meaning, between squiggles on the page and what they mean, or in the terminology of another philosophical tradition, between the signifier and the signified. Gottlob Frege’s sense/reference distinction complicates this distinction between sign and meaning and is necessary for if the signified or meaning is understood purely referentially then a number of semantic puzzles arise. Prior to the sense/reference distinction being drawn there is a distinction between sign and meaning, signifier and signified. The sign is a linguistic item, a piece of language, and the signified is the meaning of the sign, where this is understood to be the reference of the sign, the thing the sign picks out. The sense/reference distinction is a distinction that refines the ‘meaning’ side of the sign/meaning distinction. With the sense/reference distinction, the informativeness of contingently true identity statements can be straightforwardly explained and distinguished from trivially true statements of self-identity.
