Truth-bearers in Frege and the Tractatus (original) (raw)

Frege's Conception of Truth: Two Readings

Ergo: an Open Access Journal of Philosophy, 2019

The object reading of Frege’s conception of truth holds that, for him, truth is an object—the truth-value the True. Greimann rebuts the object reading and suggests an alternative reading. According to his suggested reading, Frege is a proponent of the assertion theory of truth, the main thesis of which is that truth is what is expressed by the form of assertoric sentences, and truth as such is neither an object nor a property. I argue that Frege cannot accept the assertion theory. I also defend the object reading by elaborating it further and replying to Greimann’s criticisms.

Thoughts about Thoughts: The Structure of Fregean Propositions

2019

This dissertation is about the structure of thought. Following Gottlob Frege, I define a thought as the sort of content relevant to determining whether an assertion is true or false. The historical component of the dissertation involves interpreting Frege’s actual views on the structure of thought. I argue that Frege did not think that a thought has a unique decomposition into its component senses, but rather the same thought can be decomposed into senses in a variety of distinct ways. I extend Frege’s position and use it to develop an account of the hierarchy of senses, the senses expressed by indexicals and demonstratives, and the distinction between logical and non-logical structure. I also discuss various connections with the nature of meta- representation, our capacity for reflective judgment, some aspects of the structure of conscious experience, the way we perceive regions of space and durations of time, and our conscious awareness of our own perceptions and events of thinking.

The Truth of Thoughts: Variations on Fregean Themes

Grazer Philosophische Studien , 2007

In this paper I present an abstract theory of senses, thoughts, and truth, inspired by ideas of Frege. "Inspired" because for the most part I shall not pretend to interpret Frege in a literal sense, but, rather, develop some of his ideas in ways that seem to me to preserve important aspects of them. Senses are characterized as identifying properties; i.e., roughly, as properties that apply, in virtue of their logical structure, to exactly one thing, if they apply to anything at all. When Frege's analysis of sentences in terms of function and arguments is combined with his analysis of quantification as higher-order predication, all sentences (formal and informal) can be analyzed in various ways as a function (predicate) applied to one or more arguments. This allows for an abstract characterization of thoughts as senses that combine other senses in a uniform way, and whose truth derives from their instantiation by corresponding items of reality.

Frege: Judgement, Truth and Facts última prova

Perrin, D.; Narboux, J-P., New Essays on Frege's Logical Investigations, 2020

At the beginning of the article “Der Gedanke”, Frege disposes of a long-standing philosophical doctrine in less than a paragraph. The discarded doctrine is nothing less than the so-called classical definition of truth, which makes it consist in the correspondence of a representation of reality with reality itself. Frege’s argument for this strong conclusion seems bizarre because it seems to be too simple. Nevertheless, I shall contend that Frege’s argument ceases to seem bizarre when it is viewed on the background of his whole logical semantics—something that Frege himself makes clear neither in “Der Gedanke” nor in any other work. On this background, the thesis of the indefinability of truth will appear to be not only plausible, but actually unavoidable.

THOUGHTS IN EXCHANGE: A NOTE ON FREGE'S TRACTATUS LETTERS

Filozofia, 2021

In 1919, when his Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), was finished but still unpublished, Wittgenstein sent the manuscript to Frege, and, as a consequence of that, they exchanged several fairly polemic letters in 1919-1920. Only Frege's letters were preserved. The letters are highly compressed in content, and offer an interesting insight in how, mostly critically, one of the authors of whom Wittgenstein held highest esteem, thought about the content, style, and organisation of the manuscript. At the same time, we can get some impression from Frege's letters how Wittgenstein reacted to his initial letter addressing the Tractatus, and how the subsequent exchange went. In this paper, I offer several observations concerning their exchange, and I compare it to the parallel exchange on the same matter between Wittgenstein and Russell.

FREGE'S CONCEPT OF THE THOUGHT: NECESSITY, ABSOLUTISM, AND TRANSCENDENTAL ARGUMENTS by

Frege's attempt to provide a foundation for the possibility of language and communication, like Kant's attempt to provide a foundation for the possibility of knowledge, fails to provide us with something absolute and foundational in a fixed sense. However, both these philosophers succeed in showing something about necessity that can be preserved independently of their absolutisms. Part III of this paper will provide reasons for accepting this thesis, while Parts I and II will provide an expository background on Frege's view in preparation for supporting the thesis. I. Overview: Frege's Ideas, Sense, and Thought In his attempt to find a foundation for mathematics in logic, Frege was led to address central issues in the theory of knowledge and meaning. In this project he advanced a radically new theory of the proposition. Frege follows the Kantian priority of judgments over concepts as the basis of his logic of propositions and for him words have meaning only in the context of sentences. Frege's views on eidetic structure and theory of the noun, of reference, definability, and well-made language remain classical. But where classical theory tried to understand the complexity of propositions by starting with a simple and uniform structure of the whole and then analyzing this into a very complex, intricate and functionally structured interior, Frege reversed this direction of analysis and saw the proposition, or "thoughts" (in his own terminology), as constructed from a few precise basic constituents. What is it to understand a language and a sentence? You must understand its parts. Whereas classical theory had not clearly distinguished the judgment from the proposition or thought, Frege says thoughts (propositions) are independent of thinking. There would be no judgment without judging, but there are thoughts without thinking. Frege's introduction of the sense/reference distinction allows thoughts to be formed and expressed without being asserted. The function of the verb in classical theory as assertive is removed from the interior of the proposition and is replaced in Frege in the distinction of complete and incomplete, which solves the problem of embedded verbs and propositions. We can "grasp" a sentence without knowing its truth-value and thereby keep knowledge of language and of the world separate. This is very classical. However, the move toward the current view that knowledge of language cannot be separated from other knowledge ironically begins in Frege with his radical reinterpretation of propositions. In classical theory, the noun system is isomorphic with eidetic structure and definition makes translation possible. Frege preserves the notion of ideas and eidetic structure in the classical sense in his notion of sense. But he distinguishes the notions of judgment and proposition which was not clear in classical theory. Frege reserves the term "idea" for that which is purely subjective, and uses "sense" as the objective though not perceived reality that stands between the object and my idea of the object and makes knowledge and communication of knowledge of objects possible.

A Path to the Tractatus: From Facts and Forms through Picturing to Modality

This paper traces Wittgenstein's philosophical development culminating in the conception, central to Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922: cited by remark number), of propositions as involving essentially a primitive notion of possibility. In § §2-7, I spell out three stages of Wittgenstein's philosophical development, starting from criticism of Russell's multiple-relation theory of judgment, going through the conception of propositions as signifying facts in "Notes on Logic," to struggles with what Wittgenstein calls the "Wahrheitsprobleme" in his wartime notebooks, in which he first considers appealing to the idea of picturing to understand propositions, before finally arriving at the modal view of proposition in the Tractatus. §1 outlines the philosophical context that illuminates the significance of the Tractarian conception of propositions: Frege and Russell's rejection of modality, and so of the ancient tradition of characterizing logic in modal terms. Against this background , Wittgenstein's view of propositions in the Tractatus appears as part of a rejoinder to Frege and Russell, bringing modality back into logic.

The Structure of Frege's Thoughts

History and Philosophy of Logic, 2011

Fregean thoughts (i.e. the senses of assertoric sentences) are structured entities because they are composed of simpler senses that are somehow ordered and interconnected. The constituent senses form a unity because some of them are ‘saturated’ and some ‘unsaturated’. This paper shows that Frege's explanation of the structure of thoughts, which is based on the ‘saturated/unsaturated’ distinction, is by no means sufficient because it permits what I call ‘wild analyses’, which have certain unwelcome consequences. Wild analyses are made possible because any ‘unsaturated’ sense that is a mode of presentation of a concept together with any ‘saturated’ sense forms a thought. The reason is that any concept can be applied to any object (which is presented by a ‘saturated’ sense). This stems from the fact that Frege was willing to admit only total functions. It is also briefly suggested what should be done to block wild analyses.