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"Sense and Reference" WRT Perception

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Do you see this masculine looking hunk of philosophical beard? His name is Frege, and he wrote on a topic called Sense and Reference theory (PhilosophyOfSciencePortal)

As discussed in earlier posts, or as I assert now, the perception of an "Other" in the outside world is more complicated than we seem to intuit. There are things happening between our eye and our mind where changes are made in both perceiving an object as well as expressing an idea to another person. Our ability to select and describe an object in the world is limited by many factors, one of which is the Sense in which we convey an idea. In Representationalism the Sense of an object only becomes a more powerful factor in daily life, as the representations which we use to understand the world contain a contextual bias. What follows is an example of how when we reference an object in the world, we cannot successfully inspire in another person that object without conveying some sense in which it is to be interpreted. Here's an example:

What do I mean by Sense? When I say "Superman" and when I say "Clark Kent" I've given the name of entirely different Senses of the same object in the world. In one sense, I'm conjuring the superhero fighting evil aspects of the character. In the other I've selected the mild mannered character. In both cases, I have selected two different aspects of the same object but described and referenced the same object. If the reader is a Representationalist (we do not perceive objects directly, we perceive a representation of an object which is in our mind/brain) then the Senses in which we understand our representations becomes the limiting factor in our ability to perceive things in our world. There's plenty of argument to be made from this model of Identity, it's a very interesting model to study.

This is only a brushing across the surface of the "Sense and Reference" model of identity which also plays a role in Reference Theory in Linguistic Philosophy. While this expose is a rough brushstroke across the concept, googling Sense and Reference will provide many useful sources of the particular paper. One such paper can be found here: Frege.

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