LANGUAGE sense) are indeed elements of thought; they stand on the same level as items for comprehension By combining subject and predicate one reaches only a thought, never passes from sense to reference, never from a thought to its truth value’ (CP 164) Sentences can occur unasserted, perhaps as a clause in a conditional, such as ‘If pigs have wings, then pigs can fly’ Though every serious sentence names a truth-value (in this case the False) the mere use of a sentence does not commit the user to specifying its truthvalue Only if we assert a sentence we say that it is a name of the True Many philosophers since Frege have made use of his distinction between sense and reference, and have accepted that there is an important difference between predication and assertion; but almost all have rejected the notion that complete sentences have a reference of any kind Indeed, in his own later writings Frege himself seems to have given up the idea that there were two grand objects, the True and the False; instead, he came to accept that truth was not an object but a property, albeit one of an indefinable, sui generis kind (CP 353) Towards the end of his life Frege became more interested in aspects of language that were not captured by his system of logic—the ‘colouring’ in the expression of thoughts Scientific language as it were presents thoughts in black and white; but in humane disciplines sentences may clothe thoughts in colourful garb, with expressions of feeling We interject words and phrases like ‘Alas!’ or ‘Thank God!’ and we use charged words like ‘cur’ instead of plain words like ‘dog’ Such features of sentences are not concerns of logic because they not affect their truth-value A statement containing the word ‘cur’ in place of ‘dog’ does not become false merely because the person uttering it does not feel the hostility that the word expresses (PW 140) In his paper ‘The Thought’ Frege considered the features of language represented by the tenses of verbs, and by indexical expressions such as ‘today’, ‘here’, and ‘I’ If a sentence contains a present-tense verb, as in ‘It is snowing’, then in order to grasp the thought expressed you need to know when the sentence was uttered Something similar happens with the use of the first-person pronoun ‘I am hungry’ said by Peter expresses a different thought than is expressed by ‘I am hungry’ said by Paul One thought may be true and the other false So one and the same sentence may, in different contexts, express a different thought The opposite may also happen, according to Frege If on December I say ‘It was snowing yesterday’ 124