This paper sheds light on an epistemological dimension of Frege’s “On Sense and Reference.” Under my suggested reading of it, one of its aims is to suggest a picture about propositional knowledge and its production. According to this picture, judgment, which produces propositional knowledge, is identification of the truth-value True with the reference of a given sentence. The propositional knowledge that p, produced by the judgment that p, consists in the knowledge of the identity between the True and the reference (...) of “p.” Judgment as such is a primitive kind of identification. It produces non-propositional knowledge of the identity of the True to which propositional knowledge is reduced. (shrink)

In the paper, I propose a novel approach to Frege’s view on the principle of compositionality, its relation to the propositional holism and the formation of concepts. The main idea is to distinguish three stages of constructing a logically perfect language. At the first stage, only a sentence as a whole expresses a Thought. It is impossible to assign meaning to less complex units. This is the stage of an ordinary language. The second phase concerns the proper level of construction (...) of a logically perfect language. We are forced to discriminate syntactic and semantic parts of sentences to account for the inference relations. We can distinguish senses and references of parts of sentences. Furthermore, it is possible here to choose between different ways of analysing the given Thought. Finally, at the third stage, every expression of the language has an unambiguous sense and this sense determines a unique reference. The logically perfect language is ready. We may view Thoughts as composed from primitive elements. Moreover, the senses of parts of a sentence correspond to the parts of a Thought, so that the structure of the sentence serves as the image of the structure of the Thought. The principle of compositionality is met and we can discern how understanding of the infinite numbers of Thoughts is possible and how languages are learnable. The main advantage of the presented view is that it allows accommodating some aspects of Frege’s philosophy that are often seen as mutually incompatible. Furthermore, I submit extensive textual data in favour of the discussed views and conceptions. (shrink)

The aim of this article is to examine Frege’s view of the context principle in his mature philosophical doctrine. Here, the author argues that the context principle is embodied in the contextual explanation of value-ranges presented in Basic Laws of Arithmetic. The contextual explanation of value-ranges plays essentially the same role as the context principle in The Foundations of Arithmetic. It is supposed to show how a reference to natural numbers is possible. Moreover, the author argues against the view that (...) the context principle should be separated from the recarving thesis. This aspect of Frege’s view leads the author to the rejection of the purely referential view of the context principle, which is fairly widely accepted in the current literature. (shrink)