Abstract

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Language differs radically from other forms of communication, and in particular from depiction. This difference stems from the following three Fregean theses about language.

Truth-values are the referents of sentences.

The reference of an incomplete expression is itself incomplete.

The referents of our words are what we talk about.

Monkeys may have cries to distinguish between, “Look out, here comes an eagle”, and “Look out here comes a snake”, but these do not constitute language unless they are made up of detachable parts such as “Look out here comes a …” and “eagle”, the latter for example allowing other things to be said about eagles, such as “Eagles hunt mainly at night”.

There are three ways to refer to an object:

DIRECT OSTENSION: e.g. This is the fifth planet from the sun [pointing to Saturn in the sky].

DEPICTING: e.g. This is the fifth planet from the sun [pointing to a picture of Saturn].

NAMING: e.g. Saturn is the fifth planet from the sun.

Both the first two methods use a non-linguistic act to link a non-linguistic object into the utterance, to complete the thought being expressed. Although the reference to the object can be done in non-linguistic ways, no amount of using names or pictures can say something about the object. This act is irreducibly linguistic, and is at the heart of what (literal, assertoric) language is about. This is why predicates are incomplete expressions. There is within the sentence an atomic mechanism of saying, something that cannot be built up out of non-saying components. When we take a name out of a sentence, the piece that is left is still a sentence, a means of saying, albeit an incomplete one.

Names stand on the borderline between saying and depicting. They are the linguistic items which are most like pictures. This can be seen from the fact that names can be replaced by pictures, as long as the latter are linked into the sentence by some form of ostension. But what makes names a genuine part of language is their possession of a sense. We can make this explicit by replacing the atomic name by a compound name, such as one formed by definite description.

The representation of concepts and relations occurs primarily in the context of language, where they are discovered as the referents of incomplete sentence fragments. Pictures contain, not a representation of the features but the features themselves. Suppose we draw a lemon and colour it yellow. Here are not depicting the concept, we are using it. The picture does not depict yellow, it is yellow. This is central to the saying-depicting distinction. A picture represents an object, but does so by employing some of the original properties of the object. A name also represents an object, but this time the context is language where we attribute features to objects by referring to them by the appropriate incomplete expressions.

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