THE LINGUISTIC TURN AND THE PROBLEM OF REFERENCE: FROM FREGE TO CONTEMPORARY THEORIES OF MEANING

Krasnikov Sergey Pavlovich

This article explores the developmental trajectory of the philosophical problem of reference, from the Fregean distinction between sense and meaning to contemporary contextual approaches within the linguistic turn. The aim is to analyze the conceptual incompatibility of classical theories of reference and identify the reasons for the impossibility of constructing a unified universal model of the connection between language and reality. Methods of historical and philosophical reconstruction, comparative analysis of theoretical models, and conceptual critique are applied. The results demonstrate that Frege's distinction between intralinguistic meaning and extralinguistic reference generates a tension that Russell's theory of descriptions amplifies through the opposition of names and descriptions, whereas Kripke's conception of rigid designators and causal chains does not eliminate the descriptive component but rather reveals its ineradicability in naming practice. An analysis of indexical expressions through Kaplan's distinction between character and content reveals the fragility of universal semantic rules when confronted with the contextual variability of actual use. A comparison of the analytical tradition with the phenomenological approach, drawing parallels between Frege and Husserl, reveals fundamental differences in the interpretation of meaning and the impossibility of a linguistic turn for phenomenology. Wittgenstein's contextual theory of meaning blurs the boundaries between semantics and pragmatics, effectively eliminating the possibility of a unified theory of reference by dissolving the problem into a diversity of language games. The study concludes that the evolution of reference theories reflects not progress in solving the original problem, but a shift from the search for universal mechanisms to the description of local practices. This indicates the constitutive incompleteness of the philosophy of language project itself and the artifactual nature of the problem of reference as a product of a particular philosophical orientation.

Keywords:reference, descriptivism, causal theory, rigid designators, indexicals, sense and meaning, linguistic turn, contextual dependence, philosophy of language, semantics