Frege's essay "Der Gedanke.Eine logische Untersuchung" was first published in the Beitrage zur Philosophie des Deutschen Idealismus for 1918-1919 and is one of three related logical studies published as a complete work by Gunther Patzig entitled Logische Untersuchungen in Gottingen, 1966 .

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)

So-called 'Frege cases' pose a challenge for anyone who would hope to treat the contents of beliefs (and similar mental states) as Russellian propositions: It is then impossible to explain people's behavior in Frege cases without invoking non-intentional features of their mental states, and doing that seems to undermine the intentionality of psychological explanation. In the present paper, I develop this sort of objection in what seems to me to be its strongest form, but then offer a response (...) to it. I grant that psychological explanation must invoke non-intentional features of mental states, but it is of crucial importance which such features must be referenced. -/- It emerges from a careful reading of Frege's own view that we need only invoke what I call 'formal' relations between mental states. I then claim that referencing such 'formal' relations within psychological explanation does not undermine its intentionality in the way that invoking, say, neurological features would. The central worry about this view is that either (a) 'formal' relations bring narrow content in through back door or (b) 'formal' relations end up doing all the explanatory work. Various forms of each worry are discussed. The crucial point, ultimately, is that the present strategy for responding to Frege cases is not available either to the 'psycho-Fregean', who would identify the content of a belief with its truth-value, nor even to someone who would identify the content of a belief with a set of possible worlds. It requires the sort of rich semantic structure that is distinctive of Russellian propositions. There is therefore no reason to suppose that the invocation of 'formal' relations threatens to deprive content of any work to do. (shrink)

Frege supposedly believes that vague predicates have no referent (Bedeutung). But given other things he evidently believes, such a position would seem to commit him to a suspect nihilism according to which assertoric sentences containing vague predicates are neither true nor false. I argue that we have good reason to resist ascribing to Frege the view that vague predicates have no Bedeutung and thus good reason to resist seeing him as committed to the suspect nihilism. In the process, (...) I call attention to several under-appreciated texts in which Frege suggests that a vague predicate, though lacking a Bedeutung of its own, can come to acquire a Bedeutung in certain contexts. The upshot of this suggestion is that vague predicates can serve the purposes of ordinary communication quite well, even if they are useless for logical purposes. (shrink)

Demonstratives seem to have posed a severe difficulty for Frege’s philosophy of language, to which his doctrine of incommunicable senses was a reaction. In “The Thought,” Frege briefly discusses sentences containing such demonstratives as “today,” “here,” and “yesterday,” and then turns to certain questions that he says are raised by the occurrence of “I” in sentences (T, 24-26). He is led to say that, when one thinks about oneself, one grasps thoughts that others cannot grasp, that cannot be (...) communicated. However, nothing could be more out of the spirit of Frege’s account of sense and thought than an incommunicable, private thought. In the first part of the paper, I explain the problem demonstratives pose for Frege, and explore three ways he might have dealt with it. I argue that none of these ways provides Frege with a solution to his problem consistent with his philosophy of language. The first two are plausible as solutions, but contradict his identification of the sense expressed by a sentence with a thought. The third preserves the identification, but is implausible. In the second part, I suggest that Frege was led to his doctrine of incommunicable senses as a result of some appreciation of the difficulties his account of demonstratives faces, for these come quickly to the surface when we think about “I.” I argue that incommunicable senses won’t help. I end by trying to identify the central problem with Frege’s approach, and sketching an alternative. (shrink)

This very brief paperli provides plausible answers to the two residual questions that Jamie Tappenden states, but leaves unanswered, in his 2024 paper ‘Following Bobzien: Some notes on Frege’s development and engagement with his environment’, namely, why Frege read Sigwart’s Logik and what caused Frege to read Prantl. (This paperli is merely historical and offers no special philosophical insights of any sort.) ---------- OPEN ACCESS. Choose 'without proxy' below.

This paper proposes a novel conception of mental files, aimed at addressing Frege puzzles. Classical Frege puzzles involve ignorance and discovery of identity. These may be addressed by accounting for a more basic way for identity to figure in thought—the treatment of beliefs by the believer as being about the same thing. This manifests itself in rational inferences that presuppose the identity of what the beliefs are about. Mental files help to provide a functional characterization of a mind (...) capable of this presupposition, but more must be said to show how it may be rational. I argue that this can be done by drawing out the way in which mental files interact with a thinker's motivational states and so come to have normative functional properties. I show how this theory works better than some other treatments of mental files. (shrink)

This paper is a discussion of Gabriel, Hülser and Schlotter’s 2009 article on a possible causal relation between Stoic logic and Frege. The paper provides detailed argument for why Rudolf Hirzel should not be taken as the qualified middleman in philosophical discussion with whom Frege learned what he ‘borrowed’ without acknowledgement from Stoic logic. Additionally, this paper offers some modest findings about some aspects of Frege's and Hirzel's lives and work habits, which may help us understand a (...) little better Frege's connection to Hirzel and to Stoic logic as well as Frege’s failure to acknowledge the Stoics. This paper is a purely historical offshoot of my essay ‘Frege plagiarized the Stoics’. Zero direct insights into either Frege’s or Stoic philosophy are offered. OPEN ACCESS. Choose 'without proxy' below. (shrink)

In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege concedes that, in many ordinary cases, variation in sense is tolerable. In a recent article in this journal, Michaelson and Textor (2023) offer a new interpretation of Frege on the tolerability of sense variation according to which variation in sense is tolerable when the conversation aims at joint action, (...) but not when the conversation aims at joint thought. We maintain, contra Michaelson and Textor, that whether sense variation is tolerable does not depend on the conversational purpose, whether it be theoretical or practical. Rather, whether sense variation is tolerable depends instead on the conversational background. This picture offers what we take to be a more plausible reconstruction of Frege’s own view. (shrink)

This is an opinionated overview of the Frege-Geach problem, in both its historical and contemporary guises. Covers Higher-order Attitude approaches, Tree-tying, Gibbard-style solutions, and Schroeder's recent A-type expressivist solution.

Frege says, at the end of a discussion of formalism in the Foundations of Arithmetic, that his own foundational program “could be called formal” but is “completely different” from the view he has just criticized. This essay examines Frege’s relationship to Hermann Hankel, his main formalist interlocutor in the Foundations, in order to make sense of these claims. The investigation reveals a surprising result: Frege’s foundational program actually has quite a lot in common with Hankel’s. This undercuts (...) Frege’s claim that his own view is completely different from Hankel’s formalism, and motivates a closer examination of where the differences lie. On the interpretation offered here, Frege shares important parts of the formalist perspective, but differs in recognizing a kind of content for arithmetical terms which can only be made available via proof from prior postulates. (shrink)

In this extended 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. -/- (Corrigendum: At school, Frege likely had seven, not ten, years of intensive Latin and four years of intensive ancient Greek courses.). (shrink)

Öz: Frege özel adların (ve diğer dilsel simgelerin) anlamları ve gönderimleri arasında ünlü ayrımını yaptığı “Anlam ve Gönderim Üzerine” (1948) adlı makalesinde, bu ayrımın önemi, gerekliliği ve sonuçları üzerine uzun değerlendirmeler yapar ancak özel adın anlamından tam olarak ne anlaşılması gerektiğinden yalnızca bir dipnotta kısaca söz eder. Örneğin “Aristoteles” özel adının anlamının Platon’un öğrencisi ve Büyük İskender’in öğretmeni ya da Stagira’da doğan Büyük İskender’in öğretmeni olarak alınabileceğini söyler. Burada dikkat çeken nokta örnekteki özel adın olası anlamları olarak gösterilen belirli (...) betimlemelerin de özel ad içeriyor olması. Anlamın Frege için bileşimsel olduğu, bir başka deyişle bir dilsel simgenin anlamının (varsa) parçalarının anlamlarınca belirlendiği düşünülürse, örnekteki belirli betimlemelerin anlamlarının saptanabilmesi için içerdikleri özel adların da anlamları saptanıp betimleme içinde geçtikleri yere konmalıdır. Bu işlem hiçbir özel ad kalmayana kadar sürdürülmelidir. Ancak biraz düşünülünce bir özel adın nesnesini tekil olarak betimleyecek ve içinde özel ad geçmeyecek bir betimleme bulmanın kolay olmadığı görülür. Örneğin yukarıdaki betimlemelerde geçen “Platon”, “Büyük İskender” ve “Stagira” gibi özel adların anlamları olabilecek ancak özel ad içermeyen betimlemeler bulmak pek kolay görünmüyor. Ortaya bir sonsuz gerileme sorunu çıkmış gibi duruyor. Frege’nin anlam-gönderim ayrımını için ciddi sonuçları olabilecek bu sorunu Frege çözebilir mi? Bu yazıda bu sorunun yanıtını arayacağım. Sorunu betimledikten sonra Frege’nin önündeki seçenekleri (örneğin bağlama duyarlı terimlerden (gösterme adılları veya belirteçler) yararlanma veya bağlamı sınırlama gibi) değerlendireceğim. -/- Abstract: In his “Sense and Reference” (1948), Frege makes his famous distinction between the sense and the reference of a proper name (and other signs) and discusses at length the significance, necessity and consequences of the distinction, but he explains how the sense of a proper name should be understood very briefly in a footnote. According to him, for example, the sense of the proper name “Aristotle” can be taken as the pupil of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great or the teacher of Alexander the Great who was born in Stagira. What is interesting here is that the definite descriptions given as the possible senses of this proper name do themselves contain proper names too. Since the sense is something compositional for Frege, which means the sense of a linguistic sign is determined by its constituents (if there are any), in order to determine the sense of definite descriptions in question, we should first determine the senses of proper names they contain and substitute these senses with the proper names themselves. This process should continue until no proper name remains. However, it does not seem easy to find a definite description which describes the object of a proper name uniquely but contains no proper name itself. For instance, could we find appropriate senses that contain no proper name for “Plato”, “Alexander the Great” and “Stagira”? It does not seem likely. A problem of infinite regress appears to arise. Can Frege solve this problem, which poses a serious threat for his sensereference distinction? I will explore this problem in this paper. After explaining the problem, I will discuss the options (e.g. turning to indexicals or context restriction) Frege can take to deal with it. (shrink)

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)

This paper argues that Frege's notoriously long commitment to Kant's thesis that Euclidean geometry is synthetic _a priori_ is best explained by realizing that Frege uses ‘intuition’ in two senses. Frege sometimes adopts the usage presented in Hermann Helmholtz's sign theory of perception. However, when using ‘intuition’ to denote the source of geometric knowledge, he is appealing to Hermann Cohen's use of Kantian terminology. We will see that Cohen reinterpreted Kantian notions, stripping them of any psychological connotation. (...) Cohen's defense of his modified Kantian thesis on the unique status of the Euclidean axioms presents Frege's own views in a much more favorable light. (shrink)

This book aims to develop certain aspects of Gottlob Frege’s theory of meaning, especially those relevant to intensional logic. It offers a new interpretation of the nature of senses, and attempts to devise a logical calculus for the theory of sense and reference that captures as closely as possible the views of the historical Frege. (The approach is contrasted with the less historically-minded Logic of Sense and Denotation of Alonzo Church.) Comparisons of Frege’s theory with those of (...) Russell and others are given. It is in the end shown that developing Frege’s theory in these ways reveals serious problems hitherto largely unnoticed, including those possibly rendering a Fregean intensional logic inconsistent even if his naïve class theory is excluded. (shrink)

Øystein Linnebo has recently shown that the existence of successors cannot be proven in predicative Frege arithmetic, using Frege’s definitions of arithmetical notions. By contrast, it is shown here that the existence of successor can be proven in ramified predicative Frege arithmetic.

Frege and Peano started in 1896 a debate where they contrasted the respective conceptions on the theory and practice of mathematical definitions. Which was (if any) the influence of the Frege-Peano debate on the conceptions by the two authors on the theme of defining in mathematics and which was the role played by this debate in the broader context of their scientific interaction?

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 received view has it that analytic philosophy emerged as a rebellion against the German Idealists (above all Hegel) and their British epigones (the British neo-Hegelians). This at least was Russell’s story: the German Idealism failed to achieve solid results in philosophy. Of course, Frege too sought after solid results. He, however, had a different story to tell. Frege never spoke against Hegel, or Fichte. Similarly to the German Idealists, his sworn enemy was the empiricism (in his case, (...) John Stuart Mill). Genealogically, this stance is not difficult to explain. Frege grew up as a philosopher in the context of the German Idealists. He was a member of Karl Snell’s “Sunday Circle” of university teachers in Jena. The group was influenced with Schelling and the German romanticists. The first Anglophone scholar to point out what Frege's thought owes to nineteenth-century Germany philosophy, Hans Sluga, argued that Frege followed the philosophical-logical tradition originating with Leibniz and Kant which Trendelenburg and Lotze developed significantly. About the same time, a philosophical historian writing in German, Gottfried Gabriel, did much to bring this tradition to light, casting Frege as neo-Kantian. Advancing beyond Sluga and Gabriel, the present paper reveals that through the mediation of Trendelenburg and especially of Lotze many elements of German idealism found their way into Frege's logic and philosophy. (shrink)

Even though Frege is a major figure in the history of analytic philosophy, it is not surprising that there are still issues surrounding his views, interpreting them, and labeling them. Frege’s view on numbers is typically termed as ‘Platonistic’ or at least a type of Platonism (Reck 2005). Still, the term ‘Platonism’ has views and assumptions ascribed to it that may be misleading and leads to mischaracterizations of Frege’s outlook on numbers and ideas. So, clarification of the (...) term ‘Platonism’ is required to portray Frege’s views more accurately (Reck 2005). This clarification gives us a better picture of what Frege is interested in and what he does not emphasize. Moreover, in such a clarifying process, we find that Frege draws significant influence from Rudolf Hermann Lotze, who is frequently called a Neo-Kantian (Vagnetti 2018). In Lotze’s major work, Logik, Lotze has a central focus on validity, in its most general form as he used it, that investigates various related topics, i.e., concepts, language, etc. (Vagnetti 2018; Lotze 1888). Furthermore, we observe that Frege’s work is so similar to Lotze, that it seems questionable to call his outlook ‘Platonism’. Therefore, attributing ‘Platonism’ to Frege may be a slight misnomer. This paper’s entirety is mostly a synthesis of a variety of articles related to Frege, Lotze, and their respective outlooks and the original works of Frege and Lotze that I use to support the view that the term ‘Platonism’ is a slight issue when predicated to Frege. As such, I include an overview of Frege’s treatment in other work that highlights the usage of the term ‘Platonism’ and how broad its uses tend to be utilized (Balaguer 2006; Burge 1992). In sum, it is observed that the general label ‘Platonism’ becomes less appropriate when we consider Lotze in the picture and contrast Lotze alongside Mr. Frege. Overall, this paper is just an explanatory one of Mr. Frege, the Platonist, and the issues of applying the term ‘Platonism’ onto him as his views are seemingly more of a segue from Lotze. Keywords: Frege, Lotze, number, objectification, Platonism, validity. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 95, Issue 3, pp 368 - 413 Frege famously maintained that concepts are not objects. A key argument of Frege’s for this view is, in outline, as follows: if we are to account for the unity of thought, concepts must be deemed _unsaturated_; since objects are, by contrast, saturated entities, concepts cannot be objects. The author investigates what can be made of this argument and, in particular, of the unsaturated/saturated distinction it invokes. Systematically exploring a (...) range of reconstructions suggested by Frege’s writings, and drawing on contemporary work, the author illustrates that no plausible reconstruction is forthcoming. In essence, it is altogether unclear how to simultaneously substantiate, on the one hand, the claim that unsaturated entities must be recognized in order to account for unity and, on the other, the claim that unsaturatedness is incompatible with objecthood. (shrink)

I argue that discussions of Frege’s conception of elucidation have suffered from a conflation of two distinct issues: elucidation of primitive scientific terms, and elucidation of the logical categories. The former seeks to bring us to grasp the Bedeutung of terms that stand at the beginning of the chain of definitions of a scientific system. The latter cannot be understood on the model of securing agreement in Bedeutung at all. I show how existing discussions of Fregean elucidation insufficiently take (...) this difference into account. I adumbrate what I take to be a more accurate understanding of Fregean elucidation of the logical categories, starting from the observation that Frege, when engaged in such elucidation, consistently reverts to talking about signs. Frege, I argue, takes signs to possess logical features, and it is these logical features which his elucidations are meant to help us to grasp. For Frege, the nature of the logical categories lies in the signs. In this way, I argue, Frege’s approach to elucidating the logical categories is incompatible with a realist conception according to which there is a logical order of reality that is prior to the logical order of language. (shrink)

This paper discusses the question to what extent Frege made serious use of semantical notions such as reference and truth. It focuses on his apparent uses of these notions in his apparently semantical discussions of his formal system in Grundgesetze der Arithmetik and defends the view that they are to be taken at face value. This paper is in some ways a companion to "Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I §§29-32", in which there is an extended, but mostly technical, discussion of (...) Frege's attempt to prove that every well-formed expression in his formal language denotes: This paper contains more in the way of a discussion of the wider, interpretive significance of the technical interpretation given there. (shrink)

This piece criticizes Fodor's argument (in The Elm and the Expert, 1994) for the claim that Frege cases should be treated as exceptions to (broad) psychological generalizations rather than as counterexamples.

Gottlob Frege criticized Kant's use of the term "representation" in a footnote in the Foundations of Arithmetics. According to Frege, Kant used the term "representation" for mental images, which are private and incommunicable, and also for objects and concepts. Kant thereby gave "a strongly subjectivistic and idealistic coloring" to his thought. The paper argues that Kant avoided the kind of subjectivism and idealism which Frege hints in his remark. For Kant, having "Vorstellungen" requires the capacity of synthesis, (...) by virtue of which the mind goes beyond its subjective states, and its modifications become presentations of an independent world. (shrink)

Frege's diatribes against psychologism have often been taken to imply that he thought that logic and thought have nothing to do with each other. I argue against this interpretation and attribute to Frege a view on which the two are tightly connected. The connection, however, derives not from logic's being founded on the empirical laws of thought but rather from thought's depending constitutively on the application to it of logic. I call this view 'psycho-logicism.'.

This paper explores the relationship between Hume's Prinicple and Basic Law V, investigating the question whether we really do need to suppose that, already in Die Grundlagen, Frege intended that HP should be justified by its derivation from Law V.

I develop a new reading of Frege’s argument for the indefinability of truth. I concentrate on what Frege literally says in the passage that contains the argument. This literal reading of the passage establishes that the indefinability argument is an arguably sound argument to the following conclusion: provided that the Fregean conception of judgment—which has recently been countered by Hanks—is correct and that truth is a property of truth-bearers, a vicious infinite regress is produced. Given this vicious regress, (...) Frege chooses to reject that truth is a property of truth-bearers. Frege’s choice leads to a unique version of the Fregean conception of judgment. His unique conception of judgment can cope with Hanks’s recent criticisms against the Fregean conception. (shrink)

Georgalis claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’ Frege thought that the indirect [ungerade] sense of an expression was identical to its normal [gewöhnlich] sense (Georgalis 2022: e.g. 4, 5, 13). In this paper, I present five arguments for the falsity of Georgalis’ claim which are based on three pieces of apparent counterevidence: a passage from Frege’s letter to Russell dated 28.12.1902; a passage from Frege’s letter to Russell dated 20.10.1902; and a passage from (...) ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’. I outline possible counter-arguments and responses. (shrink)

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)

Frege claims that the laws of logic are characterized by their “generality,” but it is hard to see how this could identify a special feature of those laws. I argue that we must understand this talk of generality in normative terms, but that what Frege says provides a normative demarcation of the logical laws only once we connect it with his thinking about truth and science. He means to be identifying the laws of logic as those that appear (...) in every one of the scientific systems whose construction is the ultimate aim of science, and in which all truths have a place. Though an account of logic in terms of scientific systems might seem hopelessly antiquated, I argue that it is not: a basically Fregean account of the nature of logic still looks quite promising. (shrink)

The main goal of this paper is to defend so-called _atomist_ approaches to concept individuation against the threat presented by what I will refer to as _Frege’s Problem Psychologized_ (FPP): difficulties presented by putative cases of co-referring but distinct concepts. The discussion will provide an opportunity to highlight the virtues of a particularly austere, reference-based version of Concept Atomism and to draw attention to some broader morals, notably that even a radical version of atomism is consistent with embracing various features (...) of cognition that are of interest to psychologists and empirically oriented philosophers. (shrink)

Frege's mature writings apparently contain two different criteria of sense identity. While in "Über Sinn und Bedeutung" (1892) and in "Kurze Übersicht meiner logischen Lehren" (1906?) he seems to advocate a psychological criterion, his letter to Husserl of December 12, 1906 offers a thoroughly logical criterion of sense identity. It is argued that the latter proposal is not a "momentary aberration", but rather Frege's official criterion; his psychological criteria only serve as a way of illustrating questions of sense (...) identity by appealing to the thoughts of completely rational thinkers. (shrink)

The following essay reconsiders the ontological and logical issues around Frege’s Basic Law (V). If focuses less on Russell’s Paradox, as most treatments of Frege’s Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (GGA)1 do, but rather on the relation between Frege’s Basic Law (V) and Cantor’s Theorem (CT). So for the most part the inconsistency of Naïve Comprehension (in the context of standard Second Order Logic) will not concern us, but rather the ontological issues central to the conflict between (BLV) and (...) (CT). These ontological issues are interesting in their own right. And if and only if in case ontological considerations make a strong case for something like (BLV) we have to trouble us with inconsistency and paraconsistency. These ontological issues also lead to a renewed methodological reflection what to assume or recognize as an axiom. (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)

By drawing attention to these facts and to the relationship between Cantor’s and Husserl's ideas, I have tried to contribute to putting Frege's attack on Husserl "in the proper light" by providing some insight into some of the issues underling criticisms which Frege himself suggested were not purely aimed at Husserl's book. I have tried to undermine the popular idea that Frege's review of the Philosophy of Arithmetic is a straightforward, objective assessment of Husserl’s book, and to (...) give some specific reasons for thinking that the uncritical reading of Frege's review has unfairly distorted philosophers' perception of a work they do not know very well. (shrink)

In the last forty years Dummett, Hanks, Künne, and Bobzien have claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question [Satzfrage] was not a thought [Gedanke] ((Dummett 1981: 307–308); (Hanks 2007: 142–143); (Künne 2010: 427–429); (Bobzien 2021: 163–164)). Recently, Textor has claimed that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was not a question [Frage] (Textor 2021: 227 fn.2). I think it is (...) possible that when Frege wrote ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was a question and a thought. To show that this possibility should not be overlooked, I have written a dialogue in which Frege responds to Dummett, Hanks, Künne, Bobzien, and Textor. -/- Bobzien seems to think that when Frege wrote ‘Die Verneinung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was not a question (Bobzien 2021: 163–165). I think it is possible that when Frege wrote ‘Die Verneinung’, he thought that the sense of a sentence-question was a question and a thought. Hence, I have also written the dialogue to show that this possibility should not be overlooked either. (shrink)

This paper argues that Carnap both did not view and should not have viewed Frege's project in the foundations of mathematics as misguided metaphysics. The reason for this is that Frege's project was to give an explication of number in a very Carnapian sense — something that was not lost on Carnap. Furthermore, Frege gives pragmatic justification for the basic features of his system, especially where there are ontological considerations. It will be argued that even on the (...) question of the independent existence of abstract objects, Frege and Carnap held remarkably similar views. I close with a discussion of why, despite all this, Frege would not accept the principle of tolerance. (shrink)

The Frege-Geach problem is a central issue in metaethics, challenging expressivist theories to justify logical inferences involving moral expressions. Expressivists argue that moral statements express attitudes rather than truth-apt propositions, yet this position struggles with preserving logical coherence in contexts where moral claims are unasserted. Solutions to this problem include Simon Blackburn’s approach involving higher-order attitudes, Mark Schroeder’s ”being for” framework, and Allan Gibbard’s theory of factual-normative worlds. Each framework contributes insights, yet a comprehensive resolution may necessitate combining linguistic (...) and pragmatic analyses with metaethical perspectives to clarify inference patterns in expressivist reasoning. (shrink)

Many philosophers have argued or taken for granted that Frege's puzzle has little or nothing to do with identity statements. I show that this is wrong, arguing that the puzzle can only be motivated relative to a thinker's beliefs about the identity or distinctness of the relevant object. The result is important, as it suggests that the puzzle can be solved, not by a semantic theory of names or referring expressions as such, but simply by a theory of identity (...) statements. To show this, I sketch a framework for developing solutions of this sort. I also consider how this result could be implemented by two influential solutions to Frege's puzzle, Perry's referential-reflexivism and Fine's semantic relationism. (shrink)

I draw attention to two questions which arise from: Frege’s underlining in a letter to Russell, some of his remarks in ‘Meine grundlegenden logischen Einsichten’/‘My basic logical insights’, and a plausible thesis regarding indirect Bedeutungen. Addressing these questions is necessary for a proper understanding of Frege’s account of „dass“-sentences/“that”-clauses.

I argue that Frege's so-called "concept 'horse' problem" is not one problem but many. When these different sub-problems are distinguished, some emerge as more tractable than others. I argue that, contrary to a widespread scholarly assumption originating with Peter Geach, there is scant evidence that Frege engaged with the general problem of the inexpressibility of logical category distinctions in writings available to Wittgenstein. In consequence, Geach is mistaken in his claim that in the Tractatus Wittgenstein simply accepts from (...) Frege certain lessons about the inexpressibility of logical category distinctions and the say-show distinction. In truth, Wittgenstein drew his own morals about these matters, quite possibly as the result of reflecting on how the general problem of the inexpressibility of logical category distinctions arises in Frege's writings , but also, quite possibly, by discerning certain glimmerings of these doctrines in the writings of Russell. (shrink)

The idea that thoughts are structured is essential to Frege's understanding of thoughts. A basic tenet of his thinking was that the structure of a sentence can serve as a model for the structure of a thought. Recent commentators have, however, identified tensions between that principle and certain other doctrines Frege held about thoughts. This paper suggests that the tensions identified by Dummett and Bell are not really tensions at all. In establishing the case against Dummett and Bell (...) the paper argues (a) that Frege was committed, in virtue of his doctrine of decomposition, to the thesis that a single sentence can express a range of thoughts, and (b) that Frege was committed, in virtue of his views about truth, to the thesis that a single thought can be expressed by structurally different sentences. But neither of these theses comes into conflict with the basic principle. (shrink)

The Frege-Husserl correspondence can be fruitfully explored so as to provide new insight into the paradox of analysis. Why are some identifies informative and others not? And how could we ascertain the issue if under scrutiny are mathematical identities, necessarily true if true at all? This text articulates the distinction between logical and semantic criteria in order to clarify a possible Fregean solution to the paradox of analysis, starting from regarding analysis as generating particular cases of Frege puzzles.

Gottlob Frege maintained that two name-containing identity sentences, represented schematically as a=a and a=b,can both be true in virtue of the same object’s self-identity but nonetheless, puzzlingly, differ in their epistemic profiles. Frege eventually resolved his puzzlement by locating the source of the purported epistemic difference between the identity sentences in a difference in the Sinne, or senses, expressed by the names that the sentences contain. -/- Thus, Frege portrayed himself as describing a puzzle that can be (...) posed prior to and independently of any particular theoretical position regarding names, and then resolving that puzzle with his theory of Sinn and Bedeutung. In this paper, I suggest that Frege’s presentation is problematic. If attempt is made to characterize the epistemic status of true identity sentences without appeal to Frege’s theoretical commitments, then what initially seemed puzzling largely dissolves. It turns out that, in order to generate puzzlement, Frege must invoke the theoretical account that he uses the puzzle to establish the purported necessity of. (shrink)

In their paper ‘Why Frege did not plagiarize the Stoics’ (Gabriel et al. 2024), G. Gabriel, K. Hülser and D. Rami provide an extended set of arguments to show that Frege didn’t, and couldn’t have, plagiarize(d) the Stoics via Prantl’s long chapter on Stoic logic (Prantl 1855) or at all, thus attempting to counter Bobzien’s 2021 ‘Frege plagiarized the Stoics’. The present short essay is Part II of a four-part refutation of Gabriel et al. 2024: The authors (...) repeatedly ‒ and wrongly ‒ claim that there is a tradition of Stoic logic (and Stoic logical terminology) transmitted continuously from antiquity to the 19th century that was generally known in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this second part of the refutation, it is shown that, and why, the authors are entirely mistaken on every one of these points. (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)