Sense and Reference - Relation To Connotation and Denotation

Relation To Connotation and Denotation

The sense-reference distinction is commonly confused with that between connotation and denotation, which predates Frege and is famously interpreted by Mill. This distinction is applied mainly to words (particularly predicates) expressing properties (e.g., red, dog, bachelor), rather than naming individuals, so the difference between the two distinctions can be hard to see. The connotation of a predicate is the concept it expresses, or more often, the set of properties that determine whether an individual falls under it. The denotation of a concept is the actual collection of entities that do fall under it. Thus the connotation of bachelor is perhaps "unmarried adult male human" and its denotation is all the bachelors in the world.

Under a descriptivist reading of Frege, sense and reference are probably the same as connotation and denotation.

Under a non-descriptivist reading, they are probably not. It is always possible to have a connotation without a denotation, which may not be the case with sense and reference. A given sense always determines the same reference, which might not be the case with connotation and denotation. Most clearly, a single concept—which by definition has only one connotation and denotation (at a time), might be expressed by terms having different senses. For example, cat and feline have precisely the same connotation (member of the Felidae family of carnivorous mammals), and obviously the same denotation (all the cats; that is, all the felines), but it is perfectly intelligible that someone should fail to realize that cat and feline mean the same—perhaps they have only heard one word applied to housecats, the other to tigers and lions. In that case, the words have different senses.