Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent (original) (raw)
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Frege on Truth, Judgment, and Objectivity
In Frege's writings, the notions of truth, judgment, and objectivity are all prominent and important. is paper explores the close connections between them, together with their ties to further cognate notions, such as those of thought, assertion, inference, logical law, and reason. It is argued that, according to Frege, these notions can only be understood properly together, in their inter-relations. Along the way, interpretations of some especially cryptic Fregean remarks, about objectivity, laws of truth, and reason, are off ered, and seemingly opposed "realist" and "idealist" strands in his position reconciled.
Rational Procedures. A neo Fregean Perspective on Thought and Judgment 2009
The dialogue: Yearbook of Philosophical Hermeneutics
In this paper I shall deal with the role of "understanding a thought" in the debate on the definition of the content of an assertion. I shall present a well known tension in Frege's writings, between a cognitive and semantic notion of sense. This tension is at the source of some of the major contemporary discussions, mainly because of the negative influence of Wittgenstein's Tractatus, which did not give in-depth consideration to the tension found in Frege. However many contemporary authors, after the first attempt by Carnap himself, have tried to make room both for a cognitive and semantic aspect of meaning. I claim that at least some of these attempts (Dummett, Perry and Chalmers) are seriously flawed, mainly due to the difficulty in making a proper connection between the two different conceptions of sense. I shall outline an alternative project, which takes into consideration Frege's requirements on antipsychologism and of the objectivity of thought, while maintaining a close connection between the two aspects of sense. The hints which may come from Frege's tension suggest some constructivist solutions, solving the tension within a framework of contemporary logic of uncertain reasoning. 1. Understanding and Judgment Frege distinguished between understanding and judgment. Understanding is a mental process, the most mysterious of all because it links the subjective realm of the consciousness to the objective realm of thought. Judgment is a mental act, the act of recognizing the truth of a thought; this act finds its proper expression in the speech act of the assertion. In recent discussions on Frege, many authors, among whom Brandom 1994, have insisted on the original definition of sense given in Begriffsschrift §3: the sense of a sentence is its inferential potential. Therefore to understand a thought means grasping the consequences of what is said, while asserting a sentence entails endorsing a commitment to the set of the consequences closed inside the conditional relation (and also a commitment to answer for the justifications which entitle one to assert the sentence). While an assertion is something dealing with a unavoidable normative aspect, a discussion of understanding means entering a descriptive task: how does understanding work? How can we describe this mental process? On the face of it, Frege oscillates between two different attitudes in discussing understanding: on the one hand he claimed to give a theory of "the mind", that is an abstract theory of the ideal mind and not of the actual minds. On the other hand, he gave examples of limited understanding and was well aware of the limitations of human minds in understanding thoughts. In this paper I shall deal with the problem of treating the topic of limited understanding seriously, using some tenets of Frege's writings as suggestions for our present worries not only in formalizing mathematical reasoning, but also commonsense reasoning. 2. Two conceptions of sense Since Carnap 1947, it has been widely recognized that Frege's notion of sense is not a clearly defined and unitary one. Some authors, like Kripke and Putnam, have tried to show that some features of the notion of sense (determining the reference and being mental content) cannot hold together. Other authors insist on the duplicity of the notion of sense, claiming that there are at least two basic notions 1 This paper is the translation of the power point presentation made at the Italo-American Conference in Rome 17 October 2007. As such it is very general and cursory, leaving to footnotes suggestions for further clarification. I want to thank Diego Marconi and Massimiliano Vignolo for their comments on an earlier draft of the paper.
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.
Logic, Judgement, and Inference. What Frege Should Have Said about Illogical Thought
Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2018
This paper addresses Frege's discussion of illogical thought in the introduction to Grundgesetze. After a brief introduction (section 1), in section 2 I discuss Frege's claims that logic is normative vis-à-vis thought, and not descriptive, while in section 3 I examine Frege's opposition to the idea that logical laws express psychological necessities. In section 4 I argue that these two strands of Frege's polemic against psychologism are two motivating factors behind his allowing for the possibility of illogical thought. I then explore (in section 5) a line of thought – originally advanced by Joan Weiner – according to which Frege should have rejected illogical thought as not constituting a genuine possibility; I argue that once developed, this line of thought constitutes an important correction (moreover, as section 6 shows, one that is consistent with Frege's two aforementioned anti-psychologistic strands) to Frege's own response to the possibility of illogical thought.
2001
For Frege's general views about truth the standard reference is the first couple of pages of 'The Thought'. Less attention has been paid to a short passage in 'On Sense and Reference'–in, fact, only one paragraph long–where Frege argues indirectly for the view that the relation between the thought and the True is an instance of the relation between sense and reference. He argues for this by discrediting the alternative view that it is an instance of the relation between “subject and predicate”. Here is the paragraph:
Frege on Anti-Psychologism and the Role of Logic in Thinking
2016
According to (what I call) the Explanatory Problem with Frege's Platonism about Thoughts, the sharp separation between the psychological and the logical on which Frege famously insists is too sharp, leaving Frege no resources to show how it could be legitimate to invoke logical laws in an explanation of our activities of thinking. I argue that there is room in Frege's philosophy for such justificatory explanations. To see how, we need first to correctly understand the lesson of Frege's attack on psychologism as fundamentally marking a contrast between justification and explanation, and, second, we must take Frege to be committed to the idea that the laws of truth are normatively constitutive for the process of thinking.
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.