Mediated Reference Theory

The mediated reference theory is a semantic theory that posits that words refer to something in the external world, but insists that there is more to the meaning of a name than simply the object to which it refers. It thus stands opposed to the theory of direct reference. Its most famous advocate is the mathematician and philosopher Gottlob Frege. The view was very widely held in the middle of the twentieth century by such philosophers as Sir Peter Strawson and John Searle.

Frege argued that the semantics of words and expressions should be divided into two elements: a sense, which is a "mode of presentation" of the reference of the name; and the reference itself, which is the object to which the name refers. And crucially, for Frege, names that refer to the same object can have different senses. (The difference in "cognitive significance" of 'a = a', and 'a = b', where 'a' and 'b' refer to the same object, has been called Frege's problem or puzzle. Frege introduces the concept of Sinn, or sense, to explain the difference.) For example, "the morning star" and "the evening star" both refer to the object Venus, but they present it to us in different ways: the former as the brightest celestial body visible in the morning, the latter as the brightest celestial body visible in the evening. And so it is, says Frege, that the statement that the morning star is the evening star is potentially informative: its meaning is not just that some object is the same as itself, but (roughly) that the brightest celestial body visible in the morning is the same object as the brightest celestial body visible in the evening.

It is because Frege uses definite descriptions in many of his examples that he is often taken to have endorsed the descriptivist theory of names, an attribution made by Saul Kripke. Most scholars of Frege's work now agree, however, that the attribution is mistaken. If so, then it is important to distinguish the mediated reference theory from the description theory of names.