ДЕНОТАЦИЯ И СМЫСЛ

Denotation and Sense

The meaning of a thing is its significance for society; it depends on the function that thing performs in the activity of people. It is determined by the real objective essence of the thing, which performs only the functions that are determined by its own nature. People convey to one another the significance of a thing by means of various language signs. In language, the practical significance of things is recorded, consolidated and preserved in the Denotation of words. Sense is a specification of Denotation in relation to other words or an objective situation. The relationship and interconnection of Denotations, which gives rise to their Sense, is determined either by objective factors of reality and the objective logic of reasoning or by subjective factors: the wishes, aspirations, social (also class) and personal aims and intentions of man, etc. Only social practice brings this or that Sense of objective meanings into conformity with the essence of real things and phenomena. It casts aside subjective distortions and fixes the diversity of senses which reproduces the real diversity of concrete things or phenomena.

In linguistics, Denotation (lexical meaning) is understood as the sense of the word. Words as a rule have different denotations and also various senses. Hence, the Denotation of words greatly depends on the context and situation in which words are used.

The concepts of Denotation and Sense in linguistic expressions which denote objects are elaborated in logical semantics. The Denotation of a linguistic expression is usually understood as the object or class of objects which denotes (names), the given expression (nominatum), and the sense of the expression is understood as its connotation, i.e., the information contained in it which makes it possible to assign the given expression to one object or another. Thus, "the Evening Star" and "the Morning Star" have as their meaning (nominatum) one and the same object, the planet Venus, but their connotation, their sense, differs. In contemporary logic, the differentiation between Denotation and Sense dates to Frege. Questions related to criteria of equality of sense (synonymies) of linguistic expressions are studied by logical semantics (see Name).