Abstract

In a well-known passage in the last chapter of Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics Michael Dummett suggests that Frege’s major “mistake”—the key to the collapse of the project of Grundgesetze—consisted in “his supposing there to be a totality containing the extension of every concept defined over it; more generally [the mistake] lay in his not having the glimmering of a suspicion of the existence of indefinitely extensible concepts” (Dummett [1991, 317]). Now, claims of the form, Frege fell into paradox because……. are notoriously difficult to assess even when what replaces the dots is relatively straightforward. Offerings have included, for instance, that — (A) Unrestricted quantification: Frege fell into paradox because he allowed himself to quantify over a single, all-inclusive domain of objects (Russell, Dummett).