Abstract
Frege’s use of a judgment stroke in his conceptual notation has been a matter of controversy, at least since Wittgenstein rejected it as “logically quite meaningless” in the Tractatus. Recent defenders of Frege include Tyler Burge, Nicolas Smith and Wolfgang Künne, whereas critics include William Taschek and Edward Kanterian. Against the background of these defenses and criticisms, the present paper argues that Frege faces a dilemma the two horns of which are related to his early and later conceptions of asserted content respectively. On the one hand, if content is thought of as something that has propositional structure, then the judgment stroke is superfluous. On the other hand, if what is to the right of the judgment stroke is conceived as a sort of name designating a truth-value, then there is no consistent way to avoid construing the judgment stroke as a kind of predicate, and thereby fail to do justice to the act-character of judgment and assertion.
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- 1.
“Judgment stroke ” is the translation chosen for the original “Urtheilsstrich”, both in the 1972 English translation of the Begriffsschrift (Frege 1972), and in the recent English translation of Grundgesetze der Arithmetik (Frege 2013). “Assertion sign ” is Russell’s term for the same sign , but seems to me inferior as a translation of Frege’s German original (even if Geach uses it in his translations).
- 2.
Translation amended. Kierkegaard refers to an actual event in a theater in St Petersburg on February 14, 1836, which was reported in Danish newspapers.
- 3.
It is arguable that Frege’s demarcation of fiction is more intricate than the above discussion suggests (cf. Gisela Bengtsson’s contribution to this volume). I allow myself to bypass such considerations here, since the complications do not affect the main point I am making about the role of the judgment stroke .
- 4.
Taschek , however, very elegantly and convincingly traces the tension within Frege’s mature system to a tension which is arguably present in his earlier works too, between a universalist-descriptive and a normative conception of logic. Making this connection also strikes me as a characteristically Tractarian move, but I cannot pursue this issue here.
- 5.
One might think that both Kanterian and Nicholas Smith (discussed below) over-emphasize the act-character of Fregean judgment. Surely, assertion is an act, which we can choose to do or not to do, and which is intentional. By contrast, judging is merely a matter of holding-true, and usually we do not chose or intend to hold specific propositions true. However, the important thing for both Kanterian and Smith seems to be the availability of the distinctions between judging and what is judged, and between asserting and what is asserted—which seems indisputable. Moreover, central normative notions apply to both judgment and assertion : they are essentially goal-directed acts aiming at truth , which in turn defines obligations of coherence, withdrawal in the light of counter-evidence, and so forth. Cf. Kremer (2000, 580) .
- 6.
Thanks to Gisela Bengtsson and Silver Bronzo for very valuable comments. Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the University of Bergen, Åbo Akademi University, and the University of Chicago. Thanks to the audiences for their comments. Work on this paper was financed by the Academy of Finland, project #267141.
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Gustafsson, M. (2018). Why Is Frege’s Judgment Stroke Superfluous?. In: Bengtsson, G., Säätelä, S., Pichler, A. (eds) New Essays on Frege. Nordic Wittgenstein Studies, vol 3. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71186-7_6
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