The purpose of this paper is to reconstruct Frege’s argument against the relativity of truth contained in his posthumous writing Logic from 1897. Two points are made. The first is that the argument is a performative version of the common objection that truth relativism is incoherent: it is designed to show that the assertion of the relativity of truth involves a performative incoherence, because the absoluteness of truth is a success condition for making assertions. From a modern point of view, (...) the central premise of the argument, that the successful making of assertions depends on the absoluteness of truth, is highly doubtful. The second point is that this premise can be made plausible within the framework of Frege’s conception of truth and assertion: it can be derived from his thesis that, in order to put something forward as true, we do not need the word ‘true’, but only the assertoric force. (shrink)

Gottlob Frege takes logic to be the science of truth throughout his career. However, the mature Frege makes remarks which seem to go against the idea that logic is the science of truth. This paper shows that we can explain away this tension in the mature Frege’s conception of logic if we accept that truth is an object, that is, the truth-vale True qua the reference of a sentence, for Frege. Even though the main thesis of this paper is a (...) conditional, I provide reasons why we ought to consider the possibility seriously that truth is an object for Frege. I also explain how we can make sense of Frege’s conception of logic as the science of truth while accepting truth is an object. (shrink)

Criticizing psychologism about logic in the Foreword of Grundgesetze, Frege examines an answer to the question of how we can justify our acknowledgment of logical axioms as true—the logical laws that cannot be proved from other laws. The answer he entertains states that we cannot reject logical axioms if we do not want to give up our judgment altogether. Suspending his judgment about this answer, Frege points out that it is still compatible with his anti-psychologist conception of logic. There are (...) two issues with this paragraph. First, it is difficult to read this paragraph consistently. Second, it is not clear why Frege brings up this particular view regarding the justification for logical axioms in the middle of his criticism of psychologism. This paper develops a consistent interpretation of this paragraph. The view on the justification for logical axioms, which Frege is dealing with, is neo-Kantian. In the paragraph, Frege is criticizing a psychologistic misunderstanding of the neo-Kantian justification for logical axioms. The way Frege explains away this misunderstanding shows that he takes the neo-Kantian justification for logical axioms to be a non-evidential epistemic warrant if it is an epistemic warrant. It is this notion of non-evidential epistemic warrant that Frege suspends his judgment about. Thus, the paragraph shows that Frege has a reason to have reservations about neo-Kantianism. Furthermore, it turns out that the sole issue between Frege and psychological logicians is whether truth is objective, which provides a different way to explain away a much-discussed tension between Begriffsschrift and Frege's anti-psychologism. (shrink)

In Die Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (I, §48), Frege introduces his rule of the fusion of horizontals, according to which if an occurrence of the horizontal stroke is followed by another occurrence of the same stroke, either in isolation or “contained” in a propositional connective, the two occurrences can be fused with each other. However, the role of this rule, and of the horizontal sign more generally, is controversial; Michael Dummett notoriously claimed, for instance, that the horizontal is “wholly superfluous” in (...) Frege's logical system. In this paper, we challenge Dummett's view by providing a comprehensive analysis of the significance of the horizontal stroke. After some preliminary remarks, we argue that even if Frege's connectives in some sense “contain” the horizontal, yet they are total functions. Then, we take up the question of the sense expressed by the horizontal, and we claim that, unlike other sentential operators, the horizontal is not sense‐compositional. Finally, we consider the semantic and pragmatic aspects of Frege's horizontal in connection to his judgment stroke and the double judgment stroke. Contra Dummett, we argue that the horizontal is a special and indispensable element of Frege's logic. (shrink)

This two-part paper reviews a scholarly debate on an alleged tension in Frege's philosophy of logic. In Section 1 of Part I, I discuss Frege's view that logic is concerned with establishing norms for correct thinking and is therefore a normative science. In Section 2, I explore a different understanding of the role of logic that Frege seems to advance: logic is constitutive of the very possibility of thought, because it sets forth necessary conditions for thought. Hence, the tension the (...) view according to which logic is normative for thought seems to be incompatible with the idea that abiding by the laws of logic forms a precondition for thought. In Section 1 of Part II, I survey a number of interpretations of Frege's conception of logic that deal with this question. I show that they are for the most part either normative readings (emphasising the former understanding of the nature of logic) or constitutive readings (emphasising the latter). Finally, in Section 2, I adjudicate the debate and aim at reconciling the normative and the constitutive strands in Frege's conception of logic. (shrink)