Philosophy of Logic and Mathematics: Proceedings of the 41st International Ludwig Wittgenstein Symposium
Doi
Abstract
In Begriffsschrift Frege proposed to ignore the part of content that is
irrelevant to logic; what remains he called ‘conceptual content’. In ‘On
sense and reference’ he renamed this ‘sense’ but failed to stress that it is a
notion belonging to the philosophy of logic, not of language. Russell seems
to have seen the importance of the notion only briefly. Wittgenstein did
not make use of the notion until he was in Norway, and only introduced the
terminology of ‘sign’ and ‘symbol’ to mark the distinction while composing
the Tractatus. Ramsey proposed to treat sign and symbol as merely
two different ways of typing token inscriptions, but this unduly brushes
over the difficulties the notion of a symbol involves. The most striking
feature of Wittgenstein’s thinking on this is the way that he generalized
Frege’s argument for the notion of sense so as to bypass his incorrect
particularization to the case of identity