What Is the Problem of Empty Terms? How Does Frege Solve It? Is His Solution Correct?

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What is the problem of empty terms? How does Frege solve it? Is his solution correct? Pablo Troussard Considering the sentence “Cupidon shoots love.” Cupidon is an empty term because it lacks a referent (Bedeutung). The referent of a proper name is the object that it refers to. As Cupidon has no real object to refer to, it lacks a referent. The referent of the whole (of the sentence) is defined by the referents of the parts. As Cupidon has no referent, the whole sentence has no referent. A sentence without a referent cannot be attached to a truth-value. Consequently “Cupidon shoots love.” is neither true nor false because the referent of a sentence is its truth-value. But the problem does not reside in the impossibility to attach a truth-value to the sentence; it is the fact that we still can understand it. This implies that a sentence does not require knowing its referent to be understood. Names must have some property, other than their reference, which explains this cognitive significance phenomenon. This is a problem for Frege because he has no account of the understanding of language with only linguistic expressions and referents. He needs more than his purely extensional theory to explain language. To overcome this problem, Frege introduces a first intensional notion: Fregean Sense (Sinn). Fragean sense could be described as an intermediary notion between linguistic expressions and their referents, which accounts for the way we think about the world. Sense is not by any means how we, as individuals, think about an object. It is a purely objective view shared throughout the world. It is the way the world can be thought about and not how we see the world. Frege implies that the senses of proper names are associated definite descriptions, whose contents uniquely pick out the reference of the names in question. Sense is in a way psychological, as
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