1. I agree with Frege that in language and sentences there is a difference between the thought expressed by a sentence, "the sense", and the truth-value of the sentence, "the referent", and that neither of these two things are more relevant than the other. (Frege, 50) This is an important distinction to make because it allows us to effectively distinguish between "the morning star" and "the evening star". Without this distinction, we would not know that they refer to the same thing (by understand the sense of each) or we would not know that they are different depending on the context upon which they are viewed (by understanding the referent/truth table).
2. I disagree with Frege that we should use truth tables to define referents, or that referents are truth values. Truth values are by nature binary propositions and they are either true or false with no middle ground, and I think some complications might arise by trying to define referents with truth values. Though I can't think of any examples right now, I think there might be examples of statements, in any natural language, that are both true and false at the same time that would be difficult to capture or understand by using truth values.
However, with that said, I could just be misunderstanding what Frege was trying to get at by using truth-values to define referents, and maybe there is a point to harnessing their binary nature to flesh out the concept of referents in sentences. So my question is what exactly does Frege gain by using truth values, and does using them help him avoid the objection I raised or others like it?
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