Frege: Aspects of Content

Frege argued for the force-content distinction not only by appealing to the logical and fictional contexts which are most closely associated with the “Frege point", but also based on the fact that an affirmative answer to a yes-no question constitutes an assertion. Supposedly this is only intelligible if the question contains a forceless thought or proposition which an affirmative answer then asserts. Against this I argue that this fact more readily supports the view that questions operate on assertions and other (...) forceful acts themselves. Force is neither added to propositions as on the traditional view, nor is it cancelled as has recently been proposed. Rather higher-level acts such as questioning, but also e.g. conditionalizing, embed and present assertoric or directive acts that are forceful and committal, while suspending commitment to them. The Frege point confounds different varieties of force and the question whether something is merely presented for consideration with the question what is so presented. Force is representational: through assertoric and directive force indicators subjects non-conceptually present positions of theoretical or practical knowledge, while interrogative acts indicate positions of wondering which strive for such knowledge. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

The distinction between content and force is ‘a corner-stone of 20-century philosophy of language’ (Recanati 2013, 622). Yet, in recent years it has been argued that (a) the motivation for drawing the content-force distinction is flawed and (b) that making it bars us from solving the problem of the unity of the proposition. In this paper I will go back to the source of the content-force distinction in Frege’s work. Frege argued that ‘the nature of a question’ requires a distinction (...) between force and content. I will reconstruct and defend Frege’s argument for the distinction and outline how the content-force distinction can be combined with a Fregean account of the unity of thought. (shrink)

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein famously criticizes Frege’s conception of assertion. “Frege’s opinion that every assertion contains an assumption”, says Wittgenstein, rests on the possibility of parsing every assertoric sentence into two components: one expressing the assumption that is put forward for assertion, the other expressing that it is asserted. But this possibility does not entail that the “assertion consists of two acts, entertaining and asserting” - any more than the possibility of rendering assertions as pairs of questions and affirmative (...) answers entails that they consist of questions. Frege scholars protest that such criticism is inappropriate, not only because Frege doesn’t speak about assumptions, but also - and crucially - because Wittgenstein fails to address the logical nature of assertion as reflected in Frege’s use of the judgment stroke. They seem to read Wittgenstein’s argument in the light of a remark in the Tractatus saying that the judgment stroke is “logically meaningless” because it simply indicates that the author holds the propositions marked with this sign to be true. In this paper, I argue that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Frege is not that the latter’s conception of judgment and assertion contains a corrupting psychological element. Rather, the criticism is that for Frege judgment and assertion are composed of two separate acts, i.e. an act of referring to a truth value and an act of determining which of the two it is. Through a detailed examination of the “black-spot analogy” in the Tractatus, I want to show that Wittgenstein presents a serious objection to Frege’s conception of judgment and assertion. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In “Die Verneinung”, Frege discusses two types of negation, a semantic one and a pragmatic one. Semantic negation consists in the application of the logical function denoted by ‘it is false that p’ to a thought, and pragmatic negation in the act of asserting or judging a thought as false. According to the standard interpretation, Frege does not acknowledge pragmatic negation, because it is logically redundant. He therefore rejects the classical dualistic view that both truth and falsity are qualities (...) of judgement and adopts instead the monistic view that to judge is always to recognize a thought as true. My aim in this paper is to show that this interpretation cannot be sustained. Though Frege does not endorse the classical view, he defends a dualistic conception that is characterized by the claim that judging is a binary operation that contains both the act of recognizing a thought as true and the act of rejecting the opposite thought as false. To make this interpretation plausible, Frege’s dualistic remarks on negation in three posthumous writings, which have received little attention so far, are analyzed in detail and their background is reconstructed. It is argued that Frege acknowledges negative judgements to account for the epistemic role of the act of judgement in the acquisition of knowledge. RESUMO Frege discute dois tipos de negação em “Die Verneinung” : uma semântica e uma pragmática. Negação semântica consiste na aplicação da função lógica denotada por ‘é falso que p’ para um pensamento, e negação pragmática no ato de afirmar ou julgar um pensamento como falso. De acordo com a interpretação padrão, Frege não reconhece a negação pragmática, porque ela é logicamente redundante. Assim, ele rejeita a visão dualística clássica de que tanto verdade quanto falsidade são qualidades de julgamento e, em vez disso, adota a visão monística de que julgar é sempre reconhecer um pensamento como verdade. Meu objetivo neste artigo é mostrar que tal interpretação não pode ser sustentada. Apesar de Frege não endossar a visão clássica, ele defende um conceito dualista que é caracterizado pela afirmação de que julgar é uma operação binária que contém tanto o ato de reconhecer um pensamento como verdade, quanto o ato de rejeitar o pensamento oposto como falso. Para tornar essa interpretação plausível, Frege faz observações dualísticas sobre a negação em três escritos póstumos, que têm recebido pouca atenção até o presente, são analisadas em detalhe e seu background é reconstruído. Argumenta-se que Frege reconhece o julgamento negativo para explicar o papel epistêmico do ato de julgar na aquisição de conhecimento. (shrink)

How is Frege able to claim that the notion of judgement is essential to his logic without introducing a form of psychologism? I argue first that Frege’s logical notion of judgement is to be distinguished from an empirical notion of judgement, that it cannot be understood as an abstract, idealized notion, and that there are doubts concerning a transcendental reading of Frege’s writings. Then, I explain that the logical notion of judgement has to be understood from a first-person perspective, to (...) be contrasted with a third-person perspective, in which judgement is understood as an empirical, psychological phenomenon. Frege’s logic is essentially a first-person engagement, as each of us can make use of the ideography as a science of logic only if we ourselves have made the relevant judgements. Finally, I claim that the judging agent as conceived by Frege can, after all, be understood as a transcendental ego. (shrink)

Assertion plays a crucial dual role in Frege's conception of logic, a formal and a transcendental one. A recurrent complaint is that Frege's inclusion of the judgement-stroke in the Begriffsschrift is either in tension with his anti-psychologism or wholly superfluous. Assertion, the objection goes, is at best of merely psychological significance. In this paper, I defend Frege against the objection by giving reasons for recognising the central logical significance of assertion in both its formal and its transcendental role.

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-à-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.. (shrink)

Examines Frege's theory of judgement, according to which a judgement is, paradigmatically, the assertion that a particular object falls under a given concept. Throughout the book the aim is to both state Frege's views clearly and concisely, and to defend, modify or reject these where appropriate.

It is urged (1) that geach is correct in his claim ("assertion", "philosophical review", 74, (1965), Page 449) that what he calls 'the frege point' is logically independent of frege's doctrine that sentences are names of objects, And (2) that frege's 'propositions of begriffsschrift' are neither truths nor falsehoods.

Frege and many following him, such as Dummett, Geach, Stenius and Hare, have envisaged a role for illocutionary force indicators in a logically perpspicuous notation. Davidson has denied that such expressions are even possible on the ground that any putative force indicator would be used by actors and jokers to heighten the drama of their performances. Davidson infers from this objection a Thesis of the Autonomy of Linguistic Meaning: symbolic representation necessarily breaks any close tie with extra-linguistic purpose. A modified (...) version of Frege's ideal is here propounded according to which all expression is a force indicator just in case it indicates force in any speech act in which it occurs. It is shown that attainment of such an ideal would not have deprived Frege of what he desired of a perspicuous notation. In elaborating this ideal we also espouse an illocutionary conception of validity and argue that the ideal is one to which English conforms: parenthetical speech act verbs in the first person present indicative active are force indicators in the modified sense. But the mere possibility of force indicators in the modified sense is enough to show Davidson's Autonomy Thesis to be at best at half-truth. (shrink)

Speech act theory is one of the more lasting products of the linguistic movement in philosophy of the mid−Twentieth century. Within philosophy itself the movement's products did not in general prove so durable. Particularly striking in this respect is the perceived fate of what was one of the most characteristic applications of the linguistic turn in philosophy, namely the view that many traditional philosophical problems are such as to yield to an understanding of the distinctive function of a particular part (...) of language. Most typically, the crucial insight was held to be that despite appearances, the function of the part of language in question is not assertoric, or descriptive, and that the traditional problems arose at least in part from a failure to appreciate this point. Thus problems in moral philosophy were thought to yield to an appreciation that moral discourse is expressive rather than descriptive, problems in the philosophy of mind to an understanding of distinctive r×le of psychological ascriptions, and so on. The philosophical journals of the 1950s are rich with views like these. (No general term for this approach seems to have become widely accepted at the time. I shall call it "non−factualism", for what it denies, most characteristically, is the fact−stating r×le of language of a certain kind.). (shrink)

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

Two claims that are hard to deny are that slurs can be offensive, and that not all uses of language are communicative. It’s therefore perplexing why no one has considered the possibility that slurs might be offensive not because of what they communicate but rather because of interpretive effects their uses might exact. In what follows, we intend to argue just that, namely, that confrontations with slurs can set in motion a kind of imaginative engagement that rouses objectionable psychological states. (...) We believe this view has precedence in Frege’s account of tone. (shrink)

Today's leading theories of meaning, chiefly those of Michael Dummett and Donald Davidson, depend crucially upon Gottlob Frege's distinctions between sense and reference, sense and utterance-force, and sense and tone. But while the notions of reference, sense, and force have dominated the discussion, the subtle workings of tone have received scant attention. Long overdue, this is the first comprehensive study of tone. Careful analysis of the more than two dozen varieties identified by Frege and Dummett reveals serious weaknesses in their (...) explanatory framework. The author sketches a broader conception in terms of speakers correctly making things out to be a certain way, a formulation that avoids the demonstrated shortcomings of Fregean truth-conditional accounts while capturing the representational character of meaning as this applies right across the language–not only to words and sentences, but to discreet linguistic components such as word-order, mood of the verb, and patterns of intonation and stress. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

In this paper we reach back to an earlier generation of discussions about both linguistic meaning and moral language to answer the still-current question as to whether and in what way some special non-descriptive feature comprises part of the semantics of identifiably ethical terms. Taking off from the failure of familiar meta-ethical theories, restricted as they are to the Fregean categories of Sense and Force , we propose that one particular variety belonging to Frege’s humble semantic category of Farbung –– (...) what Dummett calls Tone –– holds the key. Specifically, the kinds of expressions that Dummett dubs “expressives”, when properly understood as representing a speaker’s sentiment, solve the mystery not only of moral discourse, but of evaluative language, broadly construed. On this basis we account for moral language’s special relation to action motivation in ways that avoid Moore’s paradox and honor, in unasserted contexts, what Geach calls ‘the Frege point’. Commitments to the public and social character of natural language are also respected. (shrink)

Die Zusammenhänge die zwischen G. Freges und R. H. Lotzes logischen Lehren bestehen, sind, wie die gemeinsame Beurteilung der Gebrauchssprache zeigt, noch tiefer als allgemein angenommen. Insbesondere die von Frege konzipierte logische Sprachkritik ist in drei Punkten von Lotze beeinflußt. Lotze fordert nämlich die strenge Trennung von Logik und Gebrauchssprache. Daneben spielt der Begriff des Logischeinfachen eine zentrale Rolle in seiner Logik. Schließlich unterscheidet er den objektiven Gedanken von seiner Färbung. The connexions that exist between the logical doctrines of G. (...) Frege and R. H. Lotze are, as shows their common treatment of natural language, deeper than is generally admitted. In particular, the logical criticism of language conceived by Frege is influenced in three points by Lotze. Firstly, Lotze postulates the strict separation of logic and natural language. Furthermore, the idea of logical simplicity plays an important role in his logic. Finally, he distinguishes objective thought from its tone. (shrink)

The idea that an utterance of a basic (nondeviant) declarative sentence expresses a single true-or-false proposition has dominated philosophical discussions of meaning in this century. Refinements aside, this idea is less of a substantive theses than it is a background assumption against which particular theories of meaning are evaluated. But there are phenomena (noted by Frege, Strawson, and Grice) that threaten at least the completeness of classical theories of meaning, which associate with an utterance of a simple sentence a truth-condition, (...) a Russellian proposition, or a Fregean thought. And it may well be the case that a framework within which utterances express sequences of propositions provides much of what is needed to account for the relevant phenomena, a better overall picture of the way language works, and an enticingly uniform perspective on a variety of semantic problems. I do not myself take to theories that multiply propositions by appealing to propositions “presupposed” or to pairs of Fregean and Russellian propositions, or theories that show no respect for a distinction between semantics and pragmatics— where the former is the study of propositions whose general form and character is determined by word meaning and syntax—or for theories that blithely abandon general principles of composition and semantic innocence. I would like to sketch a package based on four interconnected ideas: (i) the meaning of an individual word is a sequence of instructions for generating a sequence of propositions (in conjunction with compositional instructions (syntax) and elements of context); (ii) utterances themselves are not bearers of truth or falsity; (iii) judgements of truth, falsity, commitment, and conflict are shaped, in part, by the weights attached to individual 1 propositions that occur in sequences expressed by utterances, weights that may be set (and reset) by contextual considerations; (iv) Fregean senses are superfluous; propositions might as well be Russellian (Mont Blanc and all its snow fields will do as well as any mode of presentation).. (shrink)

I offer a theory of propositional attitudeascriptions that reconciles a number of independently plausiblesemantic principles. At the heart of the theory lies the claim thatpsychological verbs (such as ``to believe'' and ``to doubt'') vary incontent indexically. After defending this claim and explaining how itrenders the aforementioned principles mutually compatible, I arguethat my account is superior to currently popular hidden indexicaltheories of attitude ascription. To conclude I indicate a number oframifications that the proposed theory has for issues in epistemology,philosophy of mind, (...) and formal semantics. (shrink)

The paper argues that colouring is a conventional ingredient of literal meaning characterized by a considerable degree of semantic under-determination and a high degree of context-sensitivity. The positive, though tentative, suggestion made in the paper is that whereas in the case of words such as "but" and "damn" we are dealing with words lacking in specificity, in the case of pejoratives in general, and racist jargon in particular, we are dealing with words that express concepts that purport to describe the (...) world as being in a certain way. The circumstance that in certain contexts of utterance colouring can be cancelled out, does not show that it forms a detachable part of a word's literal meaning. It only shows that to account for the interplay between context, literal meaning and assertoric content is much trickier than meets the eye. (shrink)

Two opposing tendencies in the philosophy of language go by the names of ‘referentialism’ and ‘inferentialism’ respectively. In the crudest version of the contrast, the referentialist account of meaning gives centre stage to the referential semantics for a language, which is then used to explain the inference rules for the language, perhaps as those which preserve truth on that semantics (since a referential semantics for a language determines the truth-conditions of its sentences). By contrast, the inferentialist account of meaning gives (...) centre stage to the inference rules for the language, which are then used to explain its referential semantics, perhaps as the semantics on which the rules preserve truth. On pain of circularity, we cannot combine both directions of explanation. (shrink)

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.

Writers on presupposition, and on the ‘‘projection problem’’ of determining the presuppositions of compound sentences from their component clauses, traditionally assign presuppositions to each clause in isolation. I argue that many presuppositional elements are anaphoric to previous discourse or contextual elements. In compound sentences, these can be other clauses of the sentence. We thus need a theory of presuppositional anaphora, analogous to the corresponding pronominal theory.

Why did Frege offer only proper names as examples of presupposition triggers? Some scholars claim that Frege simply did not care about the full range of presuppositional phenomena. This paper argues, in contrast, that he had good reasons for employing an extremely narrow notion of ‘Voraussetzung’. On Frege’s view, many devices that are now construed as presupposition triggers either express several thoughts at once or merely ‘illuminate’ a thought in a particular way. Fregean presuppositions, in contrast, are essentially tied to (...) names. (shrink)

ABSTRACT This paper offers a detailed reconstruction of Frege’s theory of side-thoughts and its relation to other parts of his pragmatics, most notably to the notion of colouring, to the notion of presupposition, and to his implicit notion of multi-propositionality. I also highlight some important differences between the subsemantic categories employed by Frege and those used in contemporary pragmatics.