Abstract

This dissertation is a largely historical study in the theory of concepts. My discussion centers on the notion of a "complex concept" or, more illuminatingly, on varieties of logical complexity that attach specifically to concepts. My main contention is that one of the principal innovations associable with the logical doctrine of Frege's Begriffsschrift is the introduction of a novel conception of complex concepts. The innovation of Frege's position can only be appreciated by seeing it against the background of the logical tradition from which it departed---a tradition that I characterize with reference to sources both from the early modern period and from the context of nineteenth-century algebraic logic. Broadly speaking, the purveyors of the earlier tradition held that logical complexity was, if not strictly identifiable with the complexity of concepts, at least parasitic upon a prior notion of the complexity of concepts. For this reason, explanations of predication and inference were characteristically based upon prior and independent accounts of concept-formation. It was just this order of priority that Frege opposed in his early elucidations of the function-argument syntax of Begriffsschrift. Frege departed from the earlier logical tradition by propounding the thesis that judgements are logically prior to concepts. I maintain that the central implication of this thesis is that an adequately general account of the complexity of concepts presupposes a prior and independent account of propositional structure. The main goal of the dissertation is to put Frege's views on concept-formation in perspective both by giving an account of the earlier approaches that Frege opposed and by relating Frege's views to elements of his broader philosophy of logic and language