The Composition of Thoughts
Noûs 45 (1):126-166 (2011)
| Abstract | Are Fregean thoughts compositionally complex and composed of senses? We argue that, in Begriffsschrift, Frege took 'conceptual contents' to be unstructured, but that he quickly moved away from this position, holding just two years later that conceptual contents divide of themselves into 'function' and 'argument'. This second position is shown to be unstable, however, by Frege's famous substitution puzzle. For Frege, the crucial question the puzzle raises is why "The Morning Star is a planet" and "The Evening Star is a planet" have different contents, but his second position predicts that they should have the same content. Frege's response to this antinomy is of course to distinguish sense from reference, but what has not previously been noticed is that this response also requires thoughts to be compositionally complex, composed of senses. That, however, raises the question just how thoughts are composed from senses. We reconstruct a Fregean answer, one that turns on an insistence that this question must be understood as semantic rather than metaphysical. It is not a question about the intrinsic nature of residents of the third realm but a question about how thoughts are expressed by sentences. | |||||||||
| Keywords | No keywords specified (fix it) | |||||||||
| Categories | ||||||||||
| Options |
|
|||||||||
Download options| PhilPapers Archive |
Upload a copy of this paper Check publisher's policy on self-archival Papers currently archived: 5,701 |
| External links |
  Try with proxy. |
| Through your library | Configure |
Similar books and articlesJames Pryor (2007). Externalism About Content and McKinsey-Style Reasoning? In Sanford Goldberg (ed.), Internalism and Externalism in Semantics and Epistemology. Oxford University Press.
Michael Dummett (1976). I. Frege as a Realist. Inquiry 19 (1-4):455-468.
Kevin C. Klement (2005). Does Frege Have Too Many Thoughts? A Cantorian Problem Revisited. Analysis 65 (1):44-49.
Edward Harcourt (1999). Frege on 'I', 'Now', 'Today' and Some Other Linguistic Devices. Synthese 121 (3):329 - 356.
Oswaldo Chateaubriand (2007). The Truth of Thoughts: Variations on Fregean Themes. Grazer Philosophische Studien 75 (1):199-215.
Bradley Rives (2009). Concept Cartesianism, Concept Pragmatism, and Frege Cases. Philosophical Studies 144 (2):211 - 238.
Marian Zouhar (2011). The Structure of Frege's Thoughts. History and Philosophy of Logic 32 (3):199-209.
Mark Textor (2009). A Repair of Frege's Theory of Thoughts. Synthese 167 (1):105 - 123.
Analytics
Monthly downloads |
Added to index2010-08-21Total downloads110 ( #5,033 of 549,119 )Recent downloads (6 months)3 ( #25,740 of 549,119 )How can I increase my downloads? |
My notes
Discussion
