Ways of Worldmaking

Die grundlagen der arithmetik: by G. Frege. English translation by J. L. Austin. 119 pages, 14 × 22 cm. Breslau, Verlag von Wilhelm Koebner, 1884, and New York, Philosophical Library, 1950. Price, $4.75

Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik

Moral Realism and the Foundations of Ethics

Edited by Ernest Lepore and Barry C. Smith Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xvi + 1083. ISBN‐10 0–19–925941–0. £85.00/$160.00 (hbk). The new Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language is big. It r...

The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language

In a posthumous text written in 1915, Frege makes some puzzling remarks about the essence of logic, arguing that the essence of logic is indicated, properly speaking, not by the word ‘true’, but by the assertoric force. William Taschek has recently shown that these remarks, which have received only little attention, are very important for understanding Frege's conception of logic. On Taschek's reconstruction, Frege characterizes logic in terms of assertoric force in order to stress the normative role that the logical laws play vis-a-vis judgement, assertion and inference. My aim in this paper is to develop and defend an alternative reconstruction according to which Frege stresses that logic is not only concerned with ‘how thoughts follow from other thoughts’, but also with the ‘step from thought to truth-value’. Frege considers logic as a branch of the theory of justification. To justify a conclusion by means of a logical inference, the ‘step from thought to truth-value’ must be taken, that is, the premis...

Frege on Truth, Assertoric Force and the Essence of Logic

Conceptual explication is an art having approximately the same importance for philosophy that logical deduction has for mathematics. To be sure, conceptual explication is important, not only for philosophy , but also for any other science. For all sciences are committed to clarify their own concepts. But philosophy is tied to conceptual explication in a special way, because the philosopher's work consists in large part in explicating concepts, just as the mathematician's work consists in large part in deriving theorems. For this reason, philosophy has closer ties with conceptual explication than does any other science. With regard to logical deduction, we already have elaborate theories at our disposal that explain the rules we follow implicitly when we are making logical deductions. Unfortunately, this does not apply also to the explication of concepts. On the contrary, it seems that Carnap's diagnosis of the state of the art from 1950 is still valid, according to which \" (p)hilosophers, scientists and mathematicians make explications very frequently \" , but \" they do not often discuss the general rules which they follow implicitly \" (Carnap 1950, p. 7). In what follows, my aim is to make some steps toward the construction of a theory of conceptual explication whose tasks are basically the following four: (i) the explication of \" explication \" ; (ii) the distinction of the main types of explication; (iii) the formulation and justification of criteria of adequacy for each type; (iv) the construction of a system of rules for each type whose observation guarantees the adequacy of the corresponding conceptual explica-tions. Such a theory would not only contribute to the methodological self-awareness of philosophy, but it may also help to resolve some of

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A Typology of Conceptual Explications

In Frege's logic, negation is understood as the ascription of falsehood to a thought. To say that snow is not white is the same as to say that is is false that snow is white. In 'Die Verneinung' (1918), Frege discusses two types of negation, a pragmatic and a semantic one. Pragmatic negation consists in the speech act of asserting (or judging) a thought as false. In this case, the ascription of falsehoof is achieved by a negative kind of assertoric force. Semantic negation, on the other hand, consists in the transition from a thought to the opposite thought. The acription of falsehood is achieved in this case by applying the sense of the words 'its is false that ...' to a thought. It is commonly assumed that Frege rejects the first type of negation, because it is logically redundant. The aim of the present paper is to show that this interpretation is partly mistaken. The problem is that there are two posthumous writings in which Frege says that to judge a thought as true and to reject the opposite thought as false are exactly the same thing.

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Frege on negative judgement and assertion

According to the standard characterization of logic in Frege's writings, the word "true" indicates the essence of logic, as the word "good" indicates the essence of ethics and the word "beautiful" the essence of aesthetics. In a posthumous writing from 1915, however, Frege says that it is the assertoric force, and not the word "true", which indicates the essence of logic properly. Prima facie, this correction is in conflict with Frege's criticism of the psychologist conception of logic. For according to this criticism, logic is not the science of the laws of "being taken as true", but the science of the laws of "being true", while the assertoric force expresses being taken as true. In previous writings, I tried to resolve this conflict by a reconstruction of Frege's conception of truth that is based on his thesis that truth is expressed in natural language by the "form of the assertoric sentence". The goal of this paper is to defend this interpretation against the objections recently made by Marco Ruffino.

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A caracterização da lógica pela força assertórica em frege. Resposta a Marco Ruffino

In his logical foundation of arithmetic, Frege faced the problem that the semantic interpretation of his system does not determine the reference of the abstract terms completely. The contextual definition of number, for instance, does not decide whether the number 5 is identical to Julius Caesar. In a late writing, Quine claimed that the indeterminacy of reference established by Frege’s Caesar problem is a special case of the indeterminacy established by his proxy-function argument. The present paper aims to show that Frege’s Caesar problem does not really support the conclusions that Quine draws from the proxy-function argument. On the contrary, it reveals that Quine’s argument is a non sequitur: it does not establish that there are alternative interpretations of our terms that are equally correct, but only that these terms are ambiguous. The latter kind of referential indeterminacy implies that almost all sentences of our overall theory of the world are either false or neither true nor false, because they contain definite descriptions whose uniqueness presupposition is not fulfilled. The proxy-function argument must therefore be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of Quine’s behaviorist premise that the reference of terms is determined only by our linguistic behavior.

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Dirk Greimann

Papers

Frege on Truth, Assertoric Force and the Essence of Logic

A Typology of Conceptual Explications

Frege on negative judgement and assertion

A caracterização da lógica pela força assertórica em frege. Resposta a Marco Ruffino

Quine’s proxy-function argument for the indeterminacy of reference and frege’s caesar problem