The simple sentence, "George IV wondered whether Scott was the author of Waverly," poses an interesting problem. If Scott=the author of Waverly, then it seems one could substitute the aforementioned sentence with, "George IV wondered whether Scott was Scott." Even if George IV were interested in logic, the second sentence seems to have an entirely different meaning from the first. Let us examine how Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell approach this puzzle.

Frege was concerned with the apparent triviality of identity statements. In the example he uses, he asks whether saying that the evening star is the same as the morning star must mean the same thing as saying that the evening star is the same as the evening star, since one should be able to substitute one thing for its equal. Frege’s first step in solving this problem lies in his distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung, or sense and reference. "Sense" can be seen as the "name, word combination, expression" and "reference" is the actual thing that the sense refers to. Thus, we can say that sense determines reference or reference is in virtue of sense. The two are separate insofar as one can exist without the other. For example, "the highest prime number," or "the present king of France," both have a sense, but neither has a reference.

It follows that "Scott" and "the author of Waverly" are different because they have different senses; it is just that they happen to have the same reference. Scott, being a proper name, has one sense; and "the author of Waverly", being a description, has a different sense. However, saying this does not suffice to explain the apparent triviality of the sentence in question. In order to understand how two words’ having different senses leads to a difference in sentences about those two words, we must say a word or two about Frege’s analysis of entire sentences: Frege claims that not only subjects (i.e. Scott, the author of Waverly), but sentences as well, have to be divided into their sense and reference. The sense of a sentence is the proposition, or the thought, and the reference is its "truth value". In other words, the reference of a sentence is either the circumstance that the sentence is true or the circumstance that the sentence is false.

Again, Frege says that entire sentences should be seen in terms of their sense and reference. If the senses of the individual parts of a sentence are different, it is then possible that both the sense and the reference of the entire sentence are different. It follows, finally, that "George IV wondered whether Scott was Scott" and "George IV wondered whether Scott was the author of Waverly" have different "cognitive significance" because although "Scott" and "the author of Waverly" have the same reference, they have a different sense. Therefore, the entire propositions not only have different senses, but also a different reference, or truth value: namely, the former sentence is false and the latter is true.

Bertrand Russell’s analysis of the sentence is somewhat different. Let us begin with the more simple sentence, "Scott was the author of Waverly" and see how Russell explains the difference between this sentence and the seemingly equivalent sentence, "Scott is Scott" before we tackle George’s curiosity. Russell thinks that the distinction between sense and reference (or denotation and meaning, as he puts it) "has been wrongly conceived." He thinks that it is not enough to say that "Scott" and "the author of Waverly" simply have the same meaning but different denotations. Russell argues that since "Scott was Scott" and "Scott was the author of Waverly" have different meanings, it has to be because "Scott" and "the author of Waverly" not only have different denotations, but different meanings as well. In other words, it seems that the meaning of the parts of the sentence are relevant to the meanings of the entire sentence.

Russell goes on to say that when you say that "Scott was a man", you are saying "x was a man" and Scott is equal to x. However, when you say, "the author of Waverly was a man", you are not similarly saying "x was a man", where x is equivalent to "the author of Waverly". Instead, Russell argues that the second sentence actually is saying two things--that there exists an author of Waverly and that that thing is a man. Thus, when you say, "Scott was the Author of Waverly" you are likewise committing yourself to two things: (1) There was one and only one thing (x) that wrote Waverly and (2) Scott was x. Russell can therefore differentiate between obvious analytic truths like "Scott was Scott" and informative identity statements by saying that the speaker is committing himself to the first premise. Scott has a meaning--namely "the author of Waverly". However, "the author of Waverly" by itself, does not have a meaning since every time it occurs, it gets "broken up" in the above manner. Russell differentiates between single words, like "Scott" and phrases like "the author of Waverly" by making it that "the author of Waverly" depends on, or is part of, the meaning of "Scott." Therefore, when we say "Scott was the author of," we cannot simply substitute "Scott" for "the author of Waverly".

Finally, let us examine the entire sentence: "George IV wondered whether Scott was the author of Waverly." Russell points out that the sentence is ambiguous in that it can have one of two meanings, depending on whether "the author of Waverly" has a primary or secondary occurrence. In the former case, the speaker wishes to say "there is one and only one author of Waverly and George wondered whether Scott was that man." In the latter case, the speaker may say, "George IV wondered whether, ‘there is one and only one x, such that x wrote Waverly,and Scott is that man.’" However, in either case one cannot substitute "Scott" for "the author of Waverly". The only real difference between the two cases is that in the former, the speaker is the one committed to the part of "the author of Waverly" that says that such a person exists and in the latter the burden rests entirely on poor old George (who was probably lucky enough not to have thought about all these problems).

March 13, 1996