The Structure of Thoughts (original) (raw)

Frege on thoughts and their structure (Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy)

Logical Analysis and the History of Philosophy, 2001

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.

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.

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.

Logic, Thinking and Language in Frege

Paradigmi. Rivista di Critica Filosofica, 2017

In this paper I take the opportunity of the recent publication of Pieranna Garavaso's and Nicla Vassallo's Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance (with whose main tenets this paper is in constant dialogue) to provide an overview of some components of Frege's conception of logic, in relation to epistemic notions such as thinking, judgement, and inference. In section 1 I discuss Frege's view that the task of logic is to provide justification for what we think, and in section 2 I show that this idea plays a central role in his view that logic is normative for judgements and inferences. In section 3 I offer a survey of Frege's manifold conception of thinking. Finally, in section 4, I analyse the relations between thinking and language in Frege's philosophy.

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.

Frege on thinking and thoughts

Metascience, 2017

Though Frege occasionally discusses actual thinking in his writings, frequently in order to contrast it with timeless thoughts or Gedanken, most scholars would agree that his scattered remarks on that issue do not deserve closer attention. The new book by Pieranna Garavaso and Nicla Vassallo (henceforth: G&V) challenges that assumption. According to G&V, Frege did not only devote ''much attention to human mental processes'' (1); he also thought these processes to be highly relevant to epistemological issues. The book contains four main chapters, all of which are based on previous work by G&V. Thus, to a large extent, the chapters can be read independently of each other. Chapter 2 discusses the ''many faces of Frege's anti-psychologism'' and argues for the surprising claim that Frege, a paradigmatic anti-psychologist, is actually committed to some kind of psychologism. This claim is based on Haack's distinction between three possible stances that may be held regarding the relation between logic and human thinking: according to strong psychologism, logic is descriptive of mental processes; weak psychologism claims that logic is prescriptive of mental processes; and anti-psychologism claims that logic ''has nothing to do'' with mental processes (24). In this sense, according to G&V, Frege's position ought to be described as a weak or prescriptive psychologism: ''For Frege, the laws of logic prescribe how actual thinking may be correct; so there is a connection between the laws of logic and actual thinking: the former prescribes the rules for the latter'' (25). I doubt that this is a correct rendering of Frege's position. Admittedly, Frege repeatedly stresses the normative function of logic, sometimes comparing it to ethics in this respect, but he nevertheless claims that the laws of logic proper-for instance, the laws expressed by Begriffsschrift axioms such as p ? (q ? p)-are