According to Frege, judgement is the ‘logically primitive activity’. So what is judgement? In his mature work, he characterizes judging as ‘acknowledging the truth’ (‘Anerkennen der Wahrheit’). Frege’s remarks about judging as acknowledging the truth of a thought require further elaboration and development. I will argue that the development that best suits his argumentative purposes takes acknowledging the truth of a thought to be a non-propositional attitude like seeing an object; it is a mental relation between a thinker, a thought, (...) and an object, namely a truth-value. (shrink)

In order to accommodate his view that quantifiers are predicates of predicates within a type theory, Frege introduces a rule which allows a function name to be formed by removing a saturated name from another saturated name which contains it. This rule requires that each name has a rather rich syntactic structure, since one must be able to recognize the occurrences of a name in a larger name. However, I argue that Frege is unable to account for this syntactic structure. (...) I argue that this problem undermines the inductive portion of Frege's proof that all of the names of his system denote in §§29–32 of The Basic Laws. (shrink)

By means of a reductio argument, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus calls into question the very idea that we can represent logical form. My paper addresses three interrelated questions: first, what conception of logical form is at issue in this argument? Second, whose conception of logic is this argument intended to undermine? And third, what could count as an adequate response to it? I show that the argument construes logical form as the universal, underlying correlation of any representation and the reality it represents. (...) I further show that the argument seeks to undermine core commitments of Frege’s and Russell’s. But the reductio, as I read it, is not intended to establish the falsity of any of their specific assumptions. Rather, its aim is to make manifest the indeterminacies that underlie the language in which these assumptions are framed, and establish the need for a transformation of that language. So understood, Wittgenstein’s argument exemplifies his idea that philosophy is not a theory, but an activity of elucidation. The interpretation I propose bears on one of the central debates in the literature, namely how we should understand Wittgenstein’s contention that his elucidations succeed despite being nonsensical. (shrink)

Why does Frege claim that logical axioms are ‘self‐evident,’ to be recognized as true ‘independently of other truths,’ and then offer arguments for those axioms? I argue that he thinks the arguments provide us with the justification that we need for accepting the axioms and that this is compatible with his remarks about self‐evidence. This compatibility depends on philosophical considerations connected with the ‘critical method’: an interesting approach to the justification of axioms endorsed by leading philosophers at the time.

Frege's conception of the logical categories has vexed commentators for decades. In this dissertation, I argue that it revolves around two forms of internality. The first is the internality of its use in the expression of judgment to the sign. A proper understanding of that internality reveals how Frege's philosophical logic cannot be fit into the framework given by the contemporary syntax/semantics distinction. The second is the internality that obtains between the way in which Begriffsschrift signs stratify into different categories, (...) on the one hand, and the way in which the realm of Bedeutungen stratifies into logical categories, on the other hand. A proper understanding of this internality reveals how Frege's conception of the relation between language and the world is neither a form of realism nor a form of linguistic idealism. To come to understand Frege's conception of the logical categories, is to come to understand both these forms of internality by coming to understand how they hang together. (shrink)

I investigate why Frege rejected the theory of types, as Russell presented it to him in their correspondence. Frege claims that it commits one to violations of the law of excluded middle, but this complaint seems to rest on a dogmatic refusal to take Russell’s proposal seriously on its own terms. What is at stake is not so much the truth of a law of logic, but the structure of the hierarchy of the logical categories, something Frege seems to neglect. (...) To come to a better understanding of Frege’s response, I proceed to investigate his conception of the nature of the logical categories, and how it differs from Russell’s. I argue that, for Frege, our grasp of the logical categories cannot be severed from our grasp of the Begriffsschrift notation itself. Russell, on the other hand, attaches no such importance to notation. From Frege’s point of view, Russell has not succeeded in presenting an alternative conception of the logical hierarchy, since such a conception must go in tandem with the development of a notation. Moreover, Frege has good reasons to think that Russell’s proposal does not admit of a suitable notation. (shrink)

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)

In a series of articles dating from 1903 to 1906, Frege criticizes Hilbert’s methodology of proving the independence and consistency of various fragments of Euclidean geometry in his Foundations of Geometry. In the final part of the last article, Frege makes his own proposal as to how the independence of genuine axioms should be proved. Frege contends that independence proofs require the development of a ‘new science’ with its own basic truths. This paper aims to provide a reconstruction of this (...) New Science that meets modern standards and to examine possible problems surrounding Frege’s original proposal. The paper is organized as follows: the first two sections summarize the main points of the Frege–Hilbert controversy and discuss some issues surrounding the problem of independence proofs. Section 3 contains an informal presentation of Frege’s proposal. In section 4 a more detailed reconstruction of Frege’s New Science is set out while section 5 examines what is left out. The concluding section is devoted to a discussion of Frege’s strategy and its significance from a broader perspective. (shrink)

Joan Weiner has recently claimed that Frege neither uses, nor has any need to use, a truth-predicate in his justification of the logical laws. She argues that because of the assimilation of sentences to proper names in his system, Frege does not need to make use of the Quinean device of semantic ascent in order to formulate the logical laws, and that the predicate ‘is the True’, which is used in Frege's justification, is not to be considered as a truth-predicate, (...) because it does not apply to true sentences or true thoughts. The present paper aims to show that Frege needs to use, and does use, a truth-predicate in this context. It is argued, first, that Frege needs to use a truthpredicate in order to show that the truth of the logical laws is evident from the senses of the sentences by means of which they are formulated, and second, that the predicate that he actually uses, ‘is the True’, must be considered as a truth-predicate in the relevant sense, because it can be used and is actually used by Frege to explain the truth-conditions of thoughts. To defend this interpretation, it is discussed whether the explanatory use of ‘is the True’ in Frege's system is compatible with his deflationary analysis of ‘true’. The paper's conclusion is that there is indeed a conflict here; but, from Frege's point of view, this conflict is due merely to the logical imperfection of natural language and does not affect the proper system but only its propaedeutic. (shrink)