topic: Frege and analytic philosophy.
(We need to bring out ideas in propositions, in words, in sentences)
Both Saussure (structuralism) and Frege (analytic philosophy) actually deserve to be read rather than only talked about indirectly.
Frege seemed to have lived a rather uneventful life.
It was mainly after his death where he was recognised.
Four general stages in ”life work”:
- Trained a s a mathematician, released the Begriffschrift in 1879. Development of a new system of symbolic logic that formalises the notion of proof in mathematics. A project of logicism, against psychologicism.
(Neuroscience, can be called an advanced version of psychologicism, ie. Our minds is something we can study through purely physiological correlates)
Also released Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, uniformization of a logical systematisation of math.
And so also semantic analysises of natural languages: Function and Concept (Funktion und Begriff) in 1892 and Sense and Reference (Sinn und Bedeutung), and On Concept and Object.
Then he also created the Grungesatz der Arithmetik – derivation of arithmetic from logic.
Russel Paradox then overturned much of Frege’s studies: The self-referential empty set.
Some principles in Frege’s theory:
”In the enquiry that follows, I have kept to three fundamental principles:
Always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, subjective from objective (Logicism)
’Nowadays, it seems, more and more supporters are being won by the view that arithmetic is a further development of logic; that a more rigorous establishment of arithmetical laws reduces them to purely logical laws and to such laws alone.”
Never to ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of propostion (The world is the totality of facts, not of things [later in Wittgenstein however])
The ”context principle: meaning of words to be understood in proposition.
The ”priority thesis”: judgements and thoughts prior to concepts.
Never to lose sight of the distinction between concept and object.” (Predicate Logic)
[Syllogistic logic: since Aristotle.
Propositional logic: since the stoics.
Predicate logic: invented by Freg, which works well with quantifiers, something not tackled before.]
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Frege
On Sense and Reference
Are there two suns?
- One that sets and one that rises
They are the same however, so there must be some way in which we distinguish these things.
How does Frege define proper name?
A=A & A=B
B must have something different about it?
What?
The context seems to be different!
Truth-Value: The referens preserves the truth-value of the proper name.
Sense – the mode of presentation which contains a certain amount of qualitites relating to a sign. Different senses carry with it different amounts of cognitive baggage.
A is one sign, B is one sign, C is one sign.
A = Friend of Henry Cavil
B = Creator of the monster
C = Victor Frankenstein
These all have different senses, but the same referent. The same Bedeutung.
Isn’t it the case that languages have the same referent but different senses?
Art however, can lack a referent, and in a sense be Pure Sense.
Some propositions can also lack referent in that they are too vague.
Ideas (Anschaung): the mental image, or representation that someone ”sees” when they bring forth what they relate to a word in their mind.
Ideas cannot be shared between individuals. They are strictly personal.
If you bring Frege’s system in terms of concepts, it begins to sound very platonic.
Read Kripke and Searle instead of Frege.
Sense & Thought
What’s the ontological status of the sense?
”The meaning of a name is not its bearer, and the meaning of a definite description is not what it denotes. Instead, meaning –or in his terminology, sense – is what determines referens. It is the mode by which the referent of a term is presented to one who understands it. This sense, or mode of presentation, is a condition, grasped by one who understands the term, satisfaction of which by an object is necessary and sufficient for that object to be the referent of the term.”
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Soames on Frege.
The excessive status of sense in natural language.
- Sense cannot be exhausted
”Comprehensive knowledge of the referens would require us to be able to say immediately whether any given sense belongs to it. To such knowledge we never attain.”
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You can never give an exhaustive list of all the senses tied to a sign.
- Sense may have no referens
”To every expression belonging to a complete totality of signs, thee should certainly correspond a definite sense […] It may perhaps be granted that every grammatically well-formed exression representing a proper name always has a sense. But this is not to say that to the sense there also corresponds a referens.”
Eg. Odysseus, who is not an actually existing object, doesn’t always have a referens, depending on the sense you give the sign Odysseus.
(You can save his philosophy kind of like this tbh)
Sense not to be confused with idea (Vorsetulling, Anschaung).
”The referens and sense of a sign are to be distinguished from the associated idea. If the referens of a sign is an object perceivable by the senses [bodily faculties], my idea of it as an internal image, arising from memories of sense impressions […] such an idea is often saturated with feeling […] The same sense is not always connected, even in the same man, with the same idea.
Frege can be said to be quite hostile to the human psyche.
He really doesn’t want to fall into psychologicism, but in my honest opinion, he ends up being more psychologicistic than most.
Sense occupies a third ream: neither an object nor a subjective idea.
”The referens of a proper name is the object itself which we designate by its means; the idea […] is wholly subjective; in between lies the sense.”
Sense seems to exist in a third, maybe Platonic, realm.
Thought can be said to be the sense of a sentence.
Thought can not be related to truth values, because only referents are related to any kind of truth value.
Only assertoric sentences have thoughts implied in them.
Sense & Reference in relation to subordinate clauses and all that junk
The principle of compositionality:
The meaning of a whole sentence is detemined by the meaning and the syntax of every individual part of the sentence.
The senses of a sentence is detemined by the senses of its parts and how they are combined.
Truth values as referens in sentences:
The referens is something objective,
We can have eg. simple declarative sentences:
” I did not eat breakfast today. ”
The sense is what we garner from the sense, eg. someone, the ”I”, did not eat breakfast today.
The referens of the sentence can be either true or false.
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Complex condiitonal sentences:
” I wouldn’t be so hungry if I had eaten breakfast. ”
The truth hinges on both the independent and dependent clause.
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Compound declarative sentences:
” It’s late and I still didn’t eat breakfast ”
The sentence is true when both the clauses are true.
When a sentence is connected with a disjunction, it is true when one of the sentences are true.
Indirect sentences:
eg. ” I believe, that I did not eat breakfast.
These sentences do not have any referentially derived truth-value.
The referens is the thought expressed, and not the believing.
Substitution:
If we substitute a single word within a sentence, what happens?
When we have a declarative statement, we can substitute senses without any difficulty.
direct quotation:
The truth value lies in whether or not the quoted actually said what the quote entails.
Indirect, paraphrasing?
There is a sense to which people actually have to agree with each other regarding what is the actual referent in a ”discussion”.
You cannot say something is true lest you can specify what that thing is.
In natural language there are certain problems relating to natural language’s naturalness, we need to invent a new system of language that renders any kind of logical relation clearly.
Frege’s Puzzle: Substituting one part of a sentence sometimes changes meaning, even though the two parts have the same referens
Eg. ”The morning star is Venus”
”The evening star is Venus”
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The same referent, so nothing has changed, the truth value remains.
”John believes that the morning star is Venus”
”John believes that the evening star is Venus”
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The principle of substitution no longer holds in regards to declarative statements of beliefs.
A subordinate clause can imply a logical relation. Eg. Napoleon example.
Sense as the referens of a clause:
”We are thus led to consider subordinate sentences or clauses. But here we meet thte question whether it is also true of the subordinate sentence that its referens is a truth value.”
Begriffschrift
”A logically perfect language should satisfy the conditions, that every expression grammatically well constructed as a proper name out of signs alreadu introduced shall in fact designate an object, and that no new sign shall introduced as a proper name without further need.”
Conclusion:
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Proposed a logicist project against relativism and psychologism.
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The ground breaking distinction between sense and referens. (for example in ”on denoting, russel”
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Language analysis