Frege: Philosophy of Language

Frege argued for the force-content distinction not only by appealing to the logical and fictional contexts which are most closely associated with the “Frege point", but also based on the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. Supposedly this is only intelligible if the question contains a forceless thought or proposition which an affirmative answer then asserts. Against this I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on assertions and other (...) forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher-level acts such as questioning, but also e.g. conditionalizing, embed and present assertoric or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge. (shrink)

We draw attention to a series of implicit assumptions that have structured the debate about Frege’s Puzzle. Once these assumptions are made explicit, we rely on them to show that if one focuses exclusively on the issues raised by Frege cases, then one obtains a powerful consideration against a fine-grained conception of propositional-attitude content. In light of this consideration, a form of Russellianism about content becomes viable.

The aim of this article is to examine Frege’s view of the context principle in his mature philosophical doctrine. Here, the author argues that the context principle is embodied in the contextual explanation of value-ranges presented in Basic Laws of Arithmetic. The contextual explanation of value-ranges plays essentially the same role as the context principle in The Foundations of Arithmetic. It is supposed to show how a reference to natural numbers is possible. Moreover, the author argues against the view that (...) the context principle should be separated from the recarving thesis. This aspect of Frege’s view leads the author to the rejection of the purely referential view of the context principle, which is fairly widely accepted in the current literature. (shrink)

In §8 of hisBegriffsschrift(1879), Gottlob Frege discusses issues related to identity. Frege begins his most famous essay,“On Sense and Denotation”(1892),published 13 years later, by criticizing the view advocated in §8. He returns to theseissues in the concluding paragraph. Controversies continue over these importantpassages. We offer an interpretation and discuss some alternatives. We defend thatin theBegriffsschrift,Frege does not hold that identity is a relation between signs.§8 of theBegriffsschriftis motivated by the conflict between two differentcriteria for sameness of conceptual content of sentences. (...) To resolve that conflict,Frege introduces‘≡’in §8 and, thus, circumstances with names as constituents. Tothe same end, in“On Sense and Denotation,”Frege introduces senses andThoughts and abandons both ‘≡’ and circumstances. He solves what we call theCo-instantiation problem, and disregards, but does not solve, the Name problem. (shrink)

This paper argues against the claim that Frege is committed to an infinite hierarchy of senses. Carnap and Kripke, along with many others, argue the contrary; I expose where all such arguments go astray. Invariably these arguments assume (without citation) that Frege holds that sense and reference are always distinct. This is the fulcrum upon which the hierarchy is hoisted. The counter to this assumption is based on two important but neglected passages. The locution ‘indirect sense’ has no ontological significance (...) for Frege. It was just a ‘short expression’ (his term) to indicate that the customary relation between sign, sense, and reference is suspended in what he called the exception case of indirect context. Once the hierarchy is abandoned, the alleged problem of just what indirect sense is, as well as questions as to why Frege said so little about it and why he did not examine iterative indirect contexts are resolved. Of course, with no hierarchy, Davidson’s “unlearnability argument” turns out to be a non-starter. Some objections to my interpretation are considered and answered. Additionally, comparisons to Dummett’s one-level view of sense, which is similar to mine are made, as well as to some two-level views (Parsons and Skiba). (shrink)

This paper investigates the connection between two recent trends in philosophy: higher-orderism and conceptual engineering. Higher-orderists use higher-order quantifiers (in particular quantifiers binding variables that occupy the syntactic positions of predicates) to express certain key metaphysical doctrines, such as the claim that there are properties. I argue that, on a natural construal, the higher-orderist approach involves an engineering project concerning, among others, the concept of existence. I distinguish between a modest construal of this project, on which it aims at engineering (...) higher-order analogues of the familiar notion of first-order existence, and an ambitious construal, on which it additionally aims at engineering a broadened notion of existence that subsumes first-order and higher-order existence. After identifying a substantial problem for the ambitious project, I investigate a possible response which is based on adopting a cumulative type theory as the background higher-order logic. While effective against the problem at hand, this strategy turns out to undermine a major reason to embrace higher-orderism in the first place, namely the idea that higher-orderism dissolves a range of otherwise intractable debates in metaphysics. Higher-orderists are therefore best advised to pursue their engineering project on the modest variant and against the background of standard type theory. (shrink)

The distinction between content and force is ‘a corner-stone of 20-century philosophy of language’ (Recanati 2013, 622). Yet, in recent years it has been argued that (a) the motivation for drawing the content-force distinction is flawed and (b) that making it bars us from solving the problem of the unity of the proposition. In this paper I will go back to the source of the content-force distinction in Frege’s work. Frege argued that ‘the nature of a question’ requires a distinction (...) between force and content. I will reconstruct and defend Frege’s argument for the distinction and outline how the content-force distinction can be combined with a Fregean account of the unity of thought. (shrink)

In his Naming and Necessity, Saul Kripke puts forth a series of arguments against theories of proper names he calls Frege-Russell theories. As the title reveals, Kripke takes Gottlob Frege's theory of sense and Bedeutung to be a good representative of these theories. In this essay, I characterize how Frege might have answered Kripke. I agree with Kripke that presumably Frege thought that the sense of a proper name is the same as some definite description. I, however, question his assumption (...) that Frege's theory of proper names was a theory of meaning as he uses the term. I go even further and suggest that it is not so obvious that Frege thought, at least always, that the role of the concept of sense in his theory is a semantic concept at all. This constitutes the heart of my reconstruction of Frege's answer. I argue that this, together with Frege's conception of natural languages, would have allowed him to hold that the sense of a proper name may sometimes be the same as the sense of an indefinite or even a wrong description. This makes Frege's theory immune to Kripke's counter-arguments. (shrink)

Number words seemingly function both as adjectives attributing cardinality properties to collections, as in Frege’s ‘Jupiter has four moons’, and as names referring to numbers, as in Frege’s ‘The number of Jupiter’s moons is four’. This leads to what Thomas Hofweber calls Frege’s Other Puzzle: How can number words function as modifiers and as singular terms if neither adjectives nor names can serve multiple semantic functions? Whereas most philosophers deny that one of these uses is genuine, we instead argue that (...) number words, like many related expressions, are polymorphic, having multiple uses whose meanings are systematically related via type shifting. (shrink)

What is the relationship between Frege’s puzzle and the puzzle of the de se? An increasingly influential view claims that the de se puzzle is merely an instance of Frege’s puzzle and that the idea that de se attitudes pose a distinctive theoretical challenge rests on a myth. Here we argue that this view is misguided. There are important differences between the two puzzles. First, unlike Frege puzzle cases, de se puzzle cases involve unshareable Fregean senses. Second, unlike Frege puzzle (...) cases, de se puzzle cases cannot be resolved by objective information alone. Further, there seem to be pure cases of each puzzle: instances of the de se puzzle which do not have a Fregean structure, and instances of Frege’s puzzle, which do not involve de se attitudes. We conclude that the two puzzles are fundamentally different and that the traditional theory of attitudes needs to be amended. (shrink)

El presente artículo tiene como principal objetivo introducir al lector algunos de los conceptos fundamentales de la filosofía de Gottlob Frege. Estos son: el binomio sentido/referencia, el valor veritativo de oraciones con elementos no referenciales, la distinción entre pensar, juzgar y aseverar, su concepción de los indéxicos y los demostrativos, así como su defensa de la existencia de un tercer reino. En algunos de ellos se mostrarán algunas problemáticas asociadas que han sido destacados por pensadores de renombre. Tal es el (...) caso, por ejemplo, de la famosa crítica de Bertrand Russell a la semántica de Frege por su incapacidad para dar cuenta del valor de verdad de oraciones ficticias. Dirigido especialmente al lector lego en la materia, aunque sin perder rigor académico, este trabajo procura presentar algunas de las principales tesis fregeanas a través de sus fuentes primarias. (shrink)

In this essay, I argue that Frege plagiarized the Stoics --and I mean exactly that-- on a large scale in his work on the philosophy of logic and language as written mainly between 1890 and his death in 1925 (much of which published posthumously) and possibly earlier. I use ‘plagiarize' (or 'plagiarise’) merely as a descriptive term. The essay is not concerned with finger pointing or casting moral judgement. The point is rather to demonstrate carefully by means of detailed evidence (...) that there are numerous (over a hundred) and extensive parallels both in formulation and --more importantly-- in content between the Stoics and Frege, parallels so plentiful that one would be hard pressed to brush them off as coincidence. These parallels include several that appear to occur in no other modern works that were published before Frege’s own and were accessible to him. Additionally, a cluster of corroborating historical data is adduced to support the suggestion, showing how easy it would have to been for Frege to plagiarize the Stoics. This (first) part of the essay is easy to read and vaguely entertaining, or so I hope. (shrink)

The paper explores what it could mean to speak of love as involving a delight in ‘the simple actuality’ of another, or, as Buber does, of the ‘touchable’ human being as ‘unique and devoid of qualities’. Developing strands in Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of perception, it is argued that the relation between recognising this as a particular individual and recognising particular qualities in her may be close to the reverse of what might be supposed: a recognition of this distinctive smile being dependent (...) on a recognition of who this is. The fundamental place of particulars, as opposed to kinds, in our thought about those we know and care for is developed in part through a phenomenological treatment of our perception of faces. That treatment is set in a context of the justification of our judgements about who someone is, and is linked with a critique of treatments of proper names of individuals in the spirit of Frege. It is in our speaking to those we know that we find a relation to a particular that is direct—not mediated by a description of its properties—that Russell sought in ‘knowledge by acquaintance’. (shrink)

I shall discuss some of the issues concerning a notorious doctrine of Frege that sentences are names of truth-values. I am interested in a problem raised by Kripke that the doctrine obscures the distinction between judgeable and unjudgeable contents. I shall present what I take to be Frege’s account of judgeable content: a proper expression of a judgeable content is susceptible to an analysis into a predicate and an argument-word, where a predicate is understood as a concept-word used to attribute (...) a certain property to the referent of the argument-word. In the light of this analysis, I shall argue that the doctrine does not obscure the distinction. The problem will also be discussed within the formal context of Grundgesetze. A new light will be shed on his rather peculiar conception of the symbol ‘ ${\boldsymbol \vdash}$’. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that, contrary to Robert Stalnaker’s highly influential account of linguistic communication, successful communication does not depend on a common ground between speaker and hearer. The problem for Stalnaker’s account manifests itself in communicative situations that represent both Lingens cases, i.e., cases involving egocentric beliefs, and Frege cases, i.e., cases involving identity confusions. I describe two hypothetical cases that involve successful communication, but in which no common ground of the kind required by Stalnaker’s account is available. (...) I therefore propose an alternative account of communication that is based on epistemic two-dimensionalism. This account maintains that communication requires the transfer of a thought content from speaker to hearer. By holding that this shared content often constitutes common ground, it preserves much of the appeal of Stalnaker’s account. However, my account allows for cases in which the shared thought content does not figure in common ground. (shrink)

The principle of compositionality requires that the meaning of a complex expression remains the same after substitution of synonymous expressions. Alleged counterexamples to compositionality seem to force a theoretical choice: either apparent synonyms are not synonyms or synonyms do not syntactically occur where they appear to occur. Some theorists have instead looked to Frege’s doctrine of “reference shift” according to which the meaning of an expression is sensitive to its linguistic context. This doctrine is alleged to retain the relevant claims (...) about synonymy and substitution while respecting the compositionality principle. Thus, Salmon :415, 2006) and Glanzberg and King :1–29, 2020) offer occurrence-based accounts of variable binding, and Pagin and Westerståhl :381–415, 2010c) argue that an occurrence-based semantics delivers a compositional account of quotation. Our thesis is this: the occurrence-based strategies resolve the apparent failures of substitutivity in the same general way as the standard expression-based semantics do. So it is a myth that a Frege-inspired occurrence-based semantics affords a genuine alternative strategy. (shrink)

Goodman and Lederman (2020) argue that the traditional Fregean strategy for preserving the validity of Leibniz’s Law of substitution fails when confronted with apparent counterexamples involving proper names embedded under propositional attitude verbs. We argue, on the contrary, that the Fregean strategy succeeds and that Goodman and Lederman’s argument misfires.

ABSTRACT This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

The paper gives a historically informed reconstruction of Frege's view of statements of number. The reconstruction supports Frege's claim that a statement can be 'about a concept' although it does...

In this paper, I revisit Frege's theory of sense and reference in the constructive setting of the meaning explanations of type theory, extending and sharpening a program–value analysis of sense and reference proposed by Martin-Löf building on previous work of Dummett. I propose a computational identity criterion for senses and argue that it validates what I see as the most plausible interpretation of Frege's equipollence principle for both sentences and singular terms. Before doing so, I examine Frege's implementation of his (...) theory of sense and reference in the logical framework of Grundgesetze, his doctrine of truth values, and views on sameness of sense as equipollence of assertions. (shrink)

The article raises the question what is the content of Frege’s infamous notion of Bedeutung? It is claimed that the so–called standard interpretation of this notion – Bedeutung as referential relation between a name and an object – was developed and established evaluating Frege’s ideas in philosophy of language in isolation from his logicist ideas. However, precisely his logicist concerns have motivated Frege’s interest in semantic issues. A broader consideration of Frege’s works reveals an internalist and rationalist notion of meaning, (...) that is based on the context principle, and that should not be reduced to mere reference. The question of the meaning of subsentential components, for Frege, is closely related to the question of the meaning of the whole sentence, that is, the meaning of sub–sentential components should be construed as secondary with regard to the meaning of the whole sentence. (shrink)

This paper argues for the centrality of expression for the project of phenomenology. It shows, first, that the concept of expression grows out of the debate with Frege concerning meaning that led to Husserl’s distinct phenomenological project. Specifically, expression is Husserl’s first attempt to more rigorously define ‘sense’ as the essential connection between subjective acts of meaning and ‘objective’ meanings. This account of expression is then taken up in Husserl’s later work on spirit, which thereby makes expression central to Husserl’s (...) entire analysis of the lifeworld. Insofar as Husserl saw phenomenology growing out of his dispute with Frege on meaning, and working toward the ability to clarify the sense of all scientific knowledge, expression names the promise inherent to phenomenology itself, that which defines the very project of phenomenology. (shrink)

In his logical foundation of arithmetic, Frege faced the problem that the semantic interpretation of his system does not determine the reference of the abstract terms completely. The contextual definition of number, for instance, does not decide whether the number 5 is identical to Julius Caesar. In a late writing, Quine claimed that the indeterminacy of reference established by Frege’s Caesar problem is a special case of the indeterminacy established by his proxy-function argument. The present paper aims to show that (...) Frege’s Caesar problem does not really support the conclusions that Quine draws from the proxy-function argument. On the contrary, it reveals that Quine’s argument is a non sequitur: it does not establish that there are alternative interpretations of our terms that are equally correct, but only that these terms are ambiguous. The latter kind of referential indeterminacy implies that almost all sentences of our overall theory of the world are either false or neither true nor false, because they contain definite descriptions whose uniqueness presupposition is not fulfilled. The proxy-function argument must therefore be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of Quine’s behaviorist premise that the reference of terms is determined only by our linguistic behavior. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege’s conception of works of art has received scant notice in the literature. This is a pity since, as this paper undertakes to reveal, his innovative philosophy of language motivated a theoretically and historically consequential, yet unaccountably marginalized Wittgenstinian line of inquiry in the domain of aesthetics. The element of Frege’s approach that most clearly inspired this development is the idea that only complete sentences articulate thoughts and that what sentences in works of drama and literary art express are (...) ‘mock thoughts’ (Schiengedanken). The early Wittgenstein closely followed Frege’s lead on this theme. One sees this, for example, in the Tractatus, where Wittgenstein announces that only sentential propositions model (‘picture’) states of affairs whereas works of art are objects we perceive sub specie aeternitatis (1961, 83). By the 1930s, however, Wittgenstein began to revise his view beyond his initial Frege-inspired standpoint. He came to insist that works of art can convey thoughts as well, but that thoughts do not model (picture) the world of facts and hence do not convey information about measurable objects and events. Rather, his contention was that aesthetically configured thoughts that artworks communicate impart information about our perspective on reality and reconfigure our view of life. To be more explicit, successful (gelungene) or ‘good’ works of art (ibid.), in Wittgenstein’s view, can supply aesthetically instructive ‘gestures’ that open to living experience promising new ways of being. It is in this respect, he held, that artists ‘have something to teach’ (1980, 36). (shrink)

One of the most pressing issues in contemporary semantics is whether propositions are structured entities that should be individuated in terms of their components or, contrarily, they lack structure and should be individuated in terms of their inferential relations. Another one is whether propositions should always contain all the information that is needed to deem them true or false—whether they should always be Fregean propositions. The latter debate might seem to presuppose a certain position in the former. However, it is (...) the first aim of this paper to argue that the two debates are orthogonal. Moreover, we will use Frege’s thoughts as an example of what we would contemporarily call ‘propositions’ that, though trivially Fregean, lack structure. Since it is not uncontroversial that Frege’s thoughts are unstructured, it is the second aim of this paper to show that it follows from Frege’s writings that they are. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Frege’s puzzling remarks on the beginning of On Sense and Reference challenge us to explain how true identity sentences of the form a = a can differ in cognitive value from sentences of the form a = b when they are made true by the same object’s self-identity. Some philosophers (e.g. Almog, Glezakos and Paganini) suggest that the puzzle cannot be set up in the context of natural languages since natural sentences, unlike those of regimented formal ones, do not wear (...) their logical properties on their sleeves. In this paper we argue that, on the contrary, there exists a notion of coordination between names which is apt to track the relevant logical properties of natural sentences and therefore to set up the puzzle in natural languages. Frege’s puzzle is here to stay. (shrink)

Departing from the dominant theories of Frege, Russell and Mill, Kit Fine has sketched a novel solution to Frege’s puzzle in his book Semantic Relationism. In this article, I briefly discuss the puzzle in its various forms and the attempted solutions of Frege and Russell. I then explicate the essential features of the new theory and critically appraise the mechanism suggested by Fine to solve the puzzle. I show that Semantic Relationism fails to address the concerns raised in the puzzle.

Frege unterscheidet bekanntlich zwischen Gegenständen und Funktionen. Im Falle Letzterer nimmt er eine ganze Hierarchie solcher Funktionen an, von der anzunehmen ist, dass sie ins Unendliche reicht. Für Begriffe, die nur auf eine Stufe anwendbar sind, bleibt deren Einordnung in diese Hierarchie im Wesentlichen folgenlos. Für Begriffe wie den der Existenz, die Entsprechungen auf allen Stufen der Hierarchie besitzen, resultieren aber Konsequenzen etwa in Hinblick auf ihre Ausdrückbarkeit in natürlichen Sprachen: Existenz schlechthin bzw. unabhängig von der Stufe der Entitäten, deren (...) Existenz behauptet werden soll, ist nach Frege nicht ausdrückbar, da es keinen entsprechenden Begriff geben kann, der auf Entitäten unterschiedlicher Stufen anwendbar ist. Damit sind nach Frege auch keine unbeschränkten Existenzquantifikationen über alle Entitäten möglich, wie sie in natürlichen Sprachen möglich zu sein scheinen. In dieser Hinsicht entspricht Freges Konzeption nur schlecht der Existenzquantifikation in natürlichen Sprachen, was zu Ausdrucksproblemen bei der Beschreibung von Freges eigener semantischer Konzeption führt und die Möglichkeit der Formulierung metaphysischer Fragen wie Warum gibt es überhaupt etwas und nicht vielmehr nichts? auszuschließen scheint. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to contribute to a better understanding of Frege’s views on semantics and metatheory by looking at his take on several themes in nineteenth century geometry that were significant for the development of modern model-theoretic semantics. I will focus on three issues in which a central semantic idea, the idea of reinterpreting non-logical terms, gradually came to play a substantial role: the introduction of elements at infinity in projective geometry; the study of transfer principles, especially (...) the principle of duality; and the use of counterexamples in independence arguments. Based on a discussion of these issues and how nineteenth century geometers reflected about them, I will then look into Frege’s take on these matters. I conclude with a discussion of Frege’s views and what they entail for the debate about his stance towards semantics and metatheory more generally. (shrink)

The translation of both ‘bedeuten’ and ‘Bedeutung’ in Frege's works remains sufficiently problematic that some contemporary authors prefer to leave these words untranslated. Here a case is made for returning to Russell's initial choice of ‘to indicate’ and ‘indication’ as better alternatives than the more usual ‘meaning’, ‘reference’, or ‘denotation’. It is argued that this choice has the philosophical payoff that Frege's controversial doctrines concerning the semantic values of sentences and predicative expressions are rendered far more comprehensible by it, and (...) that this translational strategy fulfills the desiderata of offering a translation which is acceptable both before and after Frege introduced the distinction between sense and reference or, as this paper would have it, between the sense of an expression and what it indicates. (shrink)

The traditional distinction between Millian and Fregean theories of names presupposes that what Mill calls ‘connotation’ lines up with what Frege calls ‘sense.’ This presupposition is false. Mill’s talk of connotation is an attempt to bring into view the line of thought that crystallizes in Frege’s distinction between concept and object. This latter is the semantic dualism of my title.

While there has been significant philosophical debate on whether nonlinguistic animals can possess conceptual capabilities, less time has been devoted to considering 'talking' animals, such as parrots. When they are discussed, their capabilities are often downplayed as mere mimicry. The most explicit philosophical example of this can be seen in Brandom's frequent comparisons of parrots and thermostats. Brandom argues that because parrots (like thermostats) cannot grasp the implicit inferential connections between concepts, their vocal articulations do not actually have any conceptual (...) content. In contrast, I argue that Pepperberg's work with Alex (and other African grey parrots) provides evidence that the vocal articulations of at least some parrots have conceptual content. Using Frege's insight that numbers assert something about a concept, I argue that Alex's ability to answer the question "How many?" depended upon a prior grasp of conceptual content. Developing this claim, I argue that Alex's arithmetical abilities show that he was capable of using numbers as both concepts and objects. Frege's theoretical insight and Pepperberg's empirical work provide reason to reconsider the capabilities of parrots, as well as what sorts of tasks provide evidence for conceptual content. (shrink)

John Perry offers a rethinking of Frege's seminal contributions to philosophy of language, which had a dominant influence on the subject in the twentieth century. He argues that Frege's famous doctrine of indirect reference led philosophers on a detour, and he advocates a move to a new framework for understanding reference.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously criticizes Frege’s conception of assertion. “Frege’s opinion that every assertion contains an assumption”, says Wittgenstein, rests on the possibility of parsing every assertoric sentence into two components: one expressing the assumption that is put forward for assertion, the other expressing that it is asserted. But this possibility does not entail that the “assertion consists of two acts, entertaining and asserting” - any more than the possibility of rendering assertions as pairs of questions and affirmative (...) answers entails that they consist of questions. Frege scholars protest that such criticism is inappropriate, not only because Frege doesn’t speak about assumptions, but also - and crucially - because Wittgenstein fails to address the logical nature of assertion as reflected in Frege’s use of the judgment stroke. They seem to read Wittgenstein’s argument in the light of a remark in the Tractatus saying that the judgment stroke is “logically meaningless” because it simply indicates that the author holds the propositions marked with this sign to be true. In this paper, I argue that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege is not that the latter’s conception of judgment and assertion contains a corrupting psychological element. Rather, the criticism is that for Frege judgment and assertion are composed of two separate acts, i.e. an act of referring to a truth value and an act of determining which of the two it is. Through a detailed examination of the “black-spot analogy” in the Tractatus, I want to show that Wittgenstein presents a serious objection to Frege’s conception of judgment and assertion. (shrink)

Evans famosamente declarou que Frege não aceitou a possibilidade de sentido sem referente, o que significa que ele não foi tão tolerante com nomes vazios quanto comumente se pensa. Um problema central para a tese de Evans é que Frege diz explicitamente que aceita esta possibilidade, e parece que ele de fato foi tolerante com nomes vazios. Neste artigo, defendo que a solução de Evans para este problema implica que Frege estava comprometido com uma explicação implausível das frases contendo nomes (...) vazios. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

De se exceptionalism is the view, notably championed by Perry (1979) and Lewis (1979), that our characteristically 'first-personal' ways of thinking about ourselves present unique challenges to standard views of propositional attitudes like belief. Though the view has won many adherents, it has recently come under a barrage of deserved criticism. A key claim of detractors is that classic examples used to motivate de se exceptionalism from de se ignorance or misidentification are nothing more than familiar Frege-puzzles, which raise no (...) issues exclusive to self-directed thought. After reviewing how this simple objection has substantial force against the classic defenses of exceptionalism, I provide new arguments based on cases of pure de se ignorance that avoid the criticism. Afterward, I revisit Lewis's defense of exceptionalism, diagnosing how he arrived at roughly the right conclusions on the basis of an argument that begged critical questions and obscured the representationally unique features of the de se. (shrink)

In this paper, I identify an assumption at play in anti-semantic interpretative approaches to Frege: the notion that translatability to Frege’s concept script functions as a criterion for deciding whether a thought is expressed in a sentence or utterance. I question the viability of this assumption by pointing to Frege’s accounts of the aim and character of his logical language and scientific discourse more generally, and by looking at his remarks on poetic forms of language, literature and fiction (Dichtung). Since (...) it seems clear that the sentences used in poetic and literary forms of language that Frege discusses, have Sinn and are possible to understand, in his view, I argue that the translatability criterion for thoughts is flawed. A discussion of Frege’s appeal to an approach of willingness to understand in a reader, and the relation between Frege’s use of elucidatory discourse and his conception of Dichtung is central to my exposition in this paper. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this paper, I argue that a number of influential Millian responses to Frege’s puzzle, which consist in denying that Frege’s data apply to natural languages, are not viable if logic is to play its role in legitimizing the logical appraisal of rational subjects. A notion of validity which does justice to the normativity of logic must make room for a distinction between valid inferences and enthymemes. I discuss the prospects of formal, relevant and manifest validity as candidates for (...) a notion which complies with this desideratum. Their success, or failure is argued to hang on the viability of a semantical account of de jure co-reference, which is in tension with standard Millian tenets. I conclude that these Millian theories face the following dilemma: either accept that there is no notion of logical validity which makes logic normative for reasoning, thus jeopardizing our well entrenched practices of rational appraisal; or accept that de jure co-reference is a real semantical relation. (shrink)

Taking a lead from Eva Picardi’s work and influence, I investigate the significance of Frege’s context principle for the philosophy of language. I argue that there are some interpretive problems with recent meta-semantic interpretations of the principle. Instead, I offer a somewhat weaker alternative: the context principle is a tool to license certain definitions. Moreover, I claim that it merely lays out one of many possible ways of licensing a definition. This means, among other things, that despite Frege’s imperative injunctions, (...) the context principle formulates a permission—not a requirement. (shrink)

This paper argues for a version of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view, comparing it to a currently popular alternative, predicativism. The Mill-Frege view combines tenets of Fregean views with features of the theory of direct reference. According to it, proper names have metalinguistic senses, known by competent speakers on the basis of their competence, which figure in ancillary presuppositions. In support of the view the paper argues that the name-bearing relation—which predicativists cite to account for the properties that they take (...) names to express—depends on acts of naming with a semantic significance. Acts of naming create particular words specifically designed for referential use, which they perform whether or not the language has other words articulated with the same sound or orthography. Like other forms of metalinguistic descriptivism, the Mill-Frege view affords responses to Kripke’s semantic and epistemic arguments against descriptivism. The view is prima facie more complex than predicativism; but the additional complexity is independently attested in natural languages and well-motivated. Finally, the Mill-Frege proposal deals well with Kripke’s modal argument, and accounts for modal intuitions about names, both issues that pose serious trouble to predicativism. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In “Die Verneinung”, Frege discusses two types of negation, a semantic one and a pragmatic one. Semantic negation consists in the application of the logical function denoted by ‘it is false that p’ to a thought, and pragmatic negation in the act of asserting or judging a thought as false. According to the standard interpretation, Frege does not acknowledge pragmatic negation, because it is logically redundant. He therefore rejects the classical dualistic view that both truth and falsity are qualities (...) of judgement and adopts instead the monistic view that to judge is always to recognize a thought as true. My aim in this paper is to show that this interpretation cannot be sustained. Though Frege does not endorse the classical view, he defends a dualistic conception that is characterized by the claim that judging is a binary operation that contains both the act of recognizing a thought as true and the act of rejecting the opposite thought as false. To make this interpretation plausible, Frege’s dualistic remarks on negation in three posthumous writings, which have received little attention so far, are analyzed in detail and their background is reconstructed. It is argued that Frege acknowledges negative judgements to account for the epistemic role of the act of judgement in the acquisition of knowledge. RESUMO Frege discute dois tipos de negação em “Die Verneinung” : uma semântica e uma pragmática. Negação semântica consiste na aplicação da função lógica denotada por ‘é falso que p’ para um pensamento, e negação pragmática no ato de afirmar ou julgar um pensamento como falso. De acordo com a interpretação padrão, Frege não reconhece a negação pragmática, porque ela é logicamente redundante. Assim, ele rejeita a visão dualística clássica de que tanto verdade quanto falsidade são qualidades de julgamento e, em vez disso, adota a visão monística de que julgar é sempre reconhecer um pensamento como verdade. Meu objetivo neste artigo é mostrar que tal interpretação não pode ser sustentada. Apesar de Frege não endossar a visão clássica, ele defende um conceito dualista que é caracterizado pela afirmação de que julgar é uma operação binária que contém tanto o ato de reconhecer um pensamento como verdade, quanto o ato de rejeitar o pensamento oposto como falso. Para tornar essa interpretação plausível, Frege faz observações dualísticas sobre a negação em três escritos póstumos, que têm recebido pouca atenção até o presente, são analisadas em detalhe e seu background é reconstruído. Argumenta-se que Frege reconhece o julgamento negativo para explicar o papel epistêmico do ato de julgar na aquisição de conhecimento. (shrink)

Frege's strict alignment between his syntactic and ontological categories is not, as is commonly assumed, some kind of a philosophical thesis. There is no thesis that proper names refer only to objects, say, or that what refers to an object is a proper name. Rather, the alignment of categories is internal to Frege's conception of what syntax and ontology are. To understand this, we need to recognise the pride of place Frege assigns within his theorising to the notion of truth. (...) For both language and the world, the Fregean categories are logical categories, categories, that is, of truth. The elaboration of this point makes clear the incoherence of supposing that they might not align. (shrink)

I offer an analysis of the sentence "the concept horse is a concept". It will be argued that the grammatical subject of this sentence, "the concept horse", indeed refers to a concept, and not to an object, as Frege once held. The argument is based on a criterion of proper-namehood according to which an expression is a proper name if it is so rendered in Frege's ideography. The predicate "is a concept", on the other hand, should not be thought of (...) as referring to a function. It will be argued that the analysis of sentences of the form "C is a concept" requires the introduction of a new form of statement. Such statements are not to be thought of as having function--argument form, but rather the structure subject--copula--predicate. (shrink)

Two claims that are hard to deny are that slurs can be offensive, and that not all uses of language are communicative. It’s therefore perplexing why no one has considered the possibility that slurs might be offensive not because of what they communicate but rather because of interpretive effects their uses might exact. In what follows, we intend to argue just that, namely, that confrontations with slurs can set in motion a kind of imaginative engagement that rouses objectionable psychological states. (...) We believe this view has precedence in Frege’s account of tone. (shrink)

In many places in his works Frege co mes to speak of fiction. Sometimes he appeals to it to get the background against which to draw the semantic boundaries of his logical investigations. Sometimes he gives examples from fiction to clarify some specific relations between his semantic concepts. It is worth analyzing Frege’s remarks on fiction in order to see if they contain insights that let us elaborate a Fregean definition of fictional discourse. It is shown that they not just (...) negatively say what fictional discourse is not, but also do indicate what it is. Furthermore, it is important to distinguish between semantic and pragmatic features of Frege’s view of fiction. The pragmatic ones, it is argued, anticipate some basic insights of a speech-act theoretical approach to fictional discourse. In addition the paper explores what Frege would tell us about the ontological status of fictional objects if the truth conditions of statements about them are taken into consideration in a Fregean manner. (shrink)