H. Sluga (Inquiry, Vol. 18 [1975], No. 4) has criticized me for representing Frege as a realist. He holds that, for Frege, abstract objects were not real: this rests on a mistranslation and a neglect of Frege's contextual principle. The latter has two aspects: as a thesis about sense, and as one about reference. It is only under the latter aspect that there is any tension between it and realism: Frege's later silence about the principle is due, not to his (...) realism, but to his assimilating sentences to proper names. Contrary to what Sluga thinks, the conception of the Bedeutung of a name as its bearer is an indispensable ingredient of Frege's notion of Bedeutung, as also is the fact that it is in the stronger of two possible senses that Frege held that Sinn determines Bedeutung. The contextual principle is not to be understood as meaning that thoughts are not, in general, complex; Frege's idea that the sense of a sentence is compounded out of the senses of its component words is an essential component of his theory of sense. Frege's realism was not the most important ingredient in his philosophy: but the attempt to interpret him otherwise than as a realist leads only to misunderstanding and confusion. (shrink)

In this note the claim is defended that Frege was a realist in the sense that he attributed causal efficacy to certain abstract objects. The arguments of Dummett and Sluga (cf. Inquiry, Vols. 18, 19, and 20 [1975–77]) to the contrary are criticized.

Die Grundlagen gehören zu den klassischen Texten der Sprachphilosophie, Logik und Mathematik. Frege stützt sein Programm einer Begründung von Arithmetik und Analysis auf reine Logik, indem er die natürlichen Zahlen als bestimmte Begriffsumfänge definiert. Die philosophische Fundierung des Fregeschen Ansatzes bilden erkenntnistheoretische und sprachphilosophische Analysen und Begriffserklärungen. Studienausgabe aufgrund der textkritisch herausgegebenen Jubiläumsausgabe (Centenarausgabe). Mit Einleitung, Anmerkungen, Literaturverzeichnis und Namenregister.

This paper examines four arguments in support of Frege's theory of incomplete entities, the heart of his semantics and ontology. Two of these arguments are based upon Frege's contributions to the foundations of mathematics. These are shown to be question-begging. Two are based upon Frege's solution to the problem of the relation of language to thought and reality. They are metaphysical in nature and they force Frege to maintain a theory of types. The latter puts his theory of incomplete entities (...) in the paradoxical position of maintaining that it is no theory at all. Moreover, his metaphysics rules out well-known suggestions for avoiding this difficulty. (shrink)