User:Peter Damian/Sense and reference
Frege's developed his original theory of meaning in early works like the Begriffsschrift ('concept script') of 1879 and the Grundlagen ('foundations of arithmetic') of 1884. On this theory, the meaning of a complete sentence consists in its being true or false,[1] and the meaning of each significant expression in the sentence is an extralinguistic entity which Frege called its Bedeutung, which literally translates as 'meaning' or 'significance', but which has been rendered by Frege's translators as 'reference', 'referent', 'Meaning', 'nominatum' etc.
Frege, arguing that the linguistic form of a mathematical equation is a sentence, [2] split the sentence up into two parts, one which is complete in itself, and which is analogous to the argument of a mathematical function, the other of which contains an empty place, by analogy with the function itself. Thus 'Caesar conquered Gaul' splits into Caesar, whose reference is Caesar himself, and the incomplete '—conquered Gaul'. Only when the empty place is filled by a proper name does the meaning of the completed sentence appear.