Abstract
What has been discussed up to now concerning Frege’s semantics was almost exclusively bound up with the relations of expressions to their sense and their reference. Of the latter, however, we have learned only that each sense can have only one reference, whereas each reference can correspond to various senses. Already in ‘On Sense and Reference’ Frege distinguished a level of references from a level of thoughts and, as we have seen in the previous chapter, raised the latter to the status of a realm of sense. The conclusion of our work will deal with some final aspects of the mutual relations between sense and reference, i.e., between realm of sense and realm of reference. The necessity of reconsidering this question should be evident even to those who hold involvement with problems of semantics and especially with the ‘realms of reference’ not only for dépassé but even for superfluous and senseless. It is of course true that the distinction between sense and reference plays a subordinate role in the construction of Frege’s logic in the Begriffsschrift; and in the Basic Laws, for example, it is invoked in only two places — once where the interpretation of arithmetic equality as identity is defended, and again where there is reference to the ‘content’ of the sentences of the Begriffsschrift. But, as can be seen in the second part of this work, the conceptual pair ‘sense and reference’ plays such a great role in the analysis of natural language that Carnap can call the use thereof the proper “method of semantic analysis” (MaN, 144). Finally, as the previous chapter indicated, Frege himself tried in his later works to anchor the logical laws themselves in the ‘realm of sense’.
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References
Wells, R. S., ‘Frege’s Ontology’, The Review of Metaphysics 4 (1951), 537–573.—Myhill, J., ‘Two Ways of Ontology in Modern Logic’, Ibid. 5 (1953), 639–655 (cf. review by W. Marshall in JSL 16 (1953), 91–92).—Bergmann, G., ‘Frege’s Hidden Nominalism’, The Philosophical Review 67 (1958), 437–459, reprinted in: Bergmann, G., Meaning and Existence,Madison 1960, 205–224.—Klemke, E.D., ‘Professor Bergmann and Frege’s “Hidden Nominalism”‘, The Philosophical Review 68 (1959), 507514.—Jackson, H., ‘Frege’s Ontology’, Ibid. 69 (1960), 394–395.—Grossmann, R. ‘Frege’s Ontology’, Ibid. 70 (1961), 23–40.—Caton, C.E., ‘An Apparent Difficulty in Frege’s Ontology’, Ibid. 71 (1962), 462–475.
This can be seen from a glance into the current philosophical dictionaries, where ‘ontology’ is explained as the doctrine on being, on the basic state of beings, on the general determinations of being, and occasionally as the logic of the real. The sense of such a doctrine is that it is more or less fixed. This is why the tradition knows only one ontology. On the contrary, for Quine, ontology is more or less elective: “Science is a continuation of common sense, and it continues the common-sense expedient of swelling ontology to simplify theory.” “Ontological questions under this view, are on a par with questions of natural science” (‘Two Dogmas of Empiricism’, in W. V. Quine, From a Logical Point of View,2nd ed., Cambridge, Mass., 1961, 20–46; quote, p. 45).
Bergmann, G., op. cit. (note 1).—Egidi, R., ‘La consistenza filosofica della logica di Frege’, Giornale critico della filosofia italiana 41 (1962), 194–208. Bergmann also criticizes Egidi’s interpretation: ‘Alternative ontologiche. Risposta alla dr. R. Egidi’, Ibid. 42 (1963), 377–405. Cf. also the author’s relevant remark in Ontologia e Conoscenza Matematica. Un Saggio su Gottlob Frege,Firenze 1963, 217 and 217 n. 2.
Natorp, P. op. cit. (106 in our bibliography), 115.
Brunschvicg, L., Les étapes de la philosophie mathématique, 3rd ed., Paris 1929, 69.
Bernays, P., ‘Sur le platonisme dans les mathématiques’, L’enseignement mathématique 34 (1935), 52–69. A. Fraenkel also spoke of ‘réalisme (platonicien)’ (ibid.,20) in his lecture ‘Sur la notion d’existence dans les mathématiques’. And Hilbert saw (in 1922) an ‘extreme conceptual realism’ in Frege (op. cit.,162).
Scholz, H., ‘Die klassische und die moderne Logik’ [Classical and Modern Logic], Blätter far deutsche Philosophie 10 (1936–1937), 254–281 (271).
In Europäische Revue 19 (1943), 74–83; reprinted in Mathesis Universalis,Basel/ Darmstadt 1961, 388–398.
Kerry, B., op. cit.,262.
This is probably the first place where Frege explicitly rejects the view of concept-words as ‘common names’.
One has to explain in this way the talk—seemingly out of step with the intended anti-psychologism—of ‘ideas [!] in the objective sense’, that belong to logic and are divided into objects and concepts (Gl.,37).
Linke’s remark that Frege was no neo-Kantian and had ‘not very much in common’ with Otto Liebmann and Bruno Bauch, who were in Jena at the same time (cf. ‘Gottlob Frege als Philosoph’, 77) is true but has to be taken with a grain of salt. For, Linke completely overlooks the fact that Frege’s doctrine on function and object and his ordering of ‘thoughts’ in a distinct sphere had a serious influence at least on Bauch. Cf. Bauch, B., ‘Über den Begriff des Naturgesetzes’ [On the Concept of Law of Nature], Kant-Studien 19 (1914); Wahrheit und Richtigkeit’ [Truth and Correctness], in Festschrift for J. Volkelt,Munich 1918; Wahrheit, Wert und Wirklichkeit [Truth, Value and Reality], Leipzig 1923; Die Idee,Leipzig 1926; etc. That Bauch is indebted to Frege in many ways is clearly expressed by R. Zocher, Die objektive Geltungslogik und der Immanenzgedanke. Eine erkenntnistheoretische Studie zum Problem des Sinnes [The Objective Logic of Validity and the Notion of Immanence. An Epistemological Study of the Problem of Sense], Tübingen 1925 (Habilitationsschrift) (cf., e.g., pp. 7, 24).
Mortan asks, obviously in relation to Scholz: “Must we really turn to a real Platonic metaphysics of the true and false and is Frege’s doctrine unthinkable without the realm of the objective-non-real?” (op. cit.,113). The answer to the question is that for Frege the objective-non-real is in fact indispensable but its recognition does not necessarily lead to a Platonism in the sense Mortan uses here.
On Lotze’s position, see A. Liebert, Das Problem der Geltung [The Problem of Validity], Berlin 1914. Zocher (op. cit.,30 n.) sees in Frege and Bauch the ‘continuation of the Lotzean theory of relations’. This is true not just of Frege’s characteristic view of the concept as function (Bartlett, 41); it seems to us least evident that Frege took this from Lotze for his theory of concept.
Gg., I,xxiv. Cf. RH, 317: “To my mind the bringing of an object under a concept is merely the recognition of a relation which already was there.”
LM, 124f. The quotation is taken from the edition of 1914 only because of its conciseness. The same view is already in the version of 1892.
SuB, 29. Similarly, BuG, 196 n. 1: “Despite the variety of languages, mankind has a common treasure of thoughts.” One could guess (but only guess) that Frege has borrowed the image from Herder, who occasionally described language as ‘a treasure-house of human thought’. It is not a modernistic whim to bring the concept of stored information into this context: for Rege, too, two sentences express the same thoughts if the one “provides neither more nor less information” than the other (BuG, 196 n.), while a sentence is content-less if one learns nothing new from it (Gef., 50). The clearest indication of the possibility of interpreting sentential sense as information is found in Frege’s remark on the transformation of a sentence by contraposition: “The sense is hardly affected since, after the transformation, the sentence provides neither less nor more information than before” (Def., 3).
According to Dummett, who saw in Münster an unpublished text to which we did not have access (cf. Philosophical Review 65 (1956), 229–230 ).
Jones already had the correct view (see p. 108 above); and in his discussion with Marshall (Philosophical Review,1953 to 1956), Dummett is of the opinion that Frege attributed sense and reference only to proper names. Wells expresses himself contradictorily: “He [i.e., Frege] posits that every expression having a denotation has a sense (but not conversely)” (op. cit.,551) but: “It is needful to introduce the sense-denotation dichotomy only within the class of objects, not within the class of functions” (553).—And it seems to us that even in the published works Frege once said explicitly that the sense of two conceptual expressions cannot be identical with the reference. In the review of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic he says of the two concept-names, ‘intersection of a plane and of the surface of a cone’ and ‘regular curves, the equation of which in parallel coordinates is of the second degree’, that “these expressions neither have the same sense nor evoke the same ideas” (RH, 320). On the other hand, in ‘On Sense and Reference’ we find concepts and relations excluded with a reference to ‘another article’. This meant ‘On Concept and Object’; but there one finds nothing about an expansion of the conceptual pair ‘sense and reference’ to concept-words or in general to function names.
Cf. Frege’s letter of May 24, 1891, to Husserl. Already here Frege distinguishes ‘sense of the concept-word’ and ‘reference of the concept-word (concept)’, so that the questionable distinction was not just post factum, i.e.,after the publication of ‘On Sense and Reference’, extended from proper names to function names.
__” asserts that the expressions “…” and “-” are synonymous. This is only a more intuitive mode of writing; it should not be said that the synonymity of two expressions implies a specific relation between their references.
Lorenzen, P., Formale Logik [Formal Logic], Berlin 1958, § 13; and ‘Gleichheit and Abstraktion’ [Equality and Abstraction], Ratio 4 (1962), 77–81.
In the work mentioned Zocher writes about the Husserlian elaboration of the opposition between psychological-subjective and logical-objective: “With less insistence and breadth but along the same lines we find the statements of Herbart, later of Frege, but above all of Bolzano. If one takes the psychological as the empirical-real and the logical as the ontological-ideal, then one can relate the opposition to Platonism” (op. cit.,1). This happens—though not explicitly—both in Frege and Husserl, and Zocher later writes of the “Fregean-Husserlian stress on the concepts ‘sense’ and ‘reference”‘ that these “still have ontological overtones” here (ibid.,24 n. 4).
Ged., 60. The obviously attractive idea of a ‘third realm’ is found in Rickert and is a middle realm of judgemental sense, being found between the ‘being of reality’ and the ‘being of truth’ (which Rickert conceives as ‘value’). This ‘third realm’ is not that of Frege. Strangely enough, the expression is used in a third and more obscure meaning in H. Weyl: “Above idealism, which is called upon to destroy the epistemologically absolutized naive realism, there rises a third realm that we, for example, find in Fichte in the last era of his philosophic activity” (Die heutige Erkenntnislage in der Mathematik [The Contemporary Epistemological Situation in Mathematics], Erlangen 1926, p. 30 ).
I.e., not just the sense of proper names and function names.
In fiction and poetry… there can be thoughts which are neither true nor false but precisely poetic” (Geom., IV, 398 n. 1).
addition) The reader can now consult my ‘Entitätentafeln’ [Tables of Entities] in: Tradition and Kritik. Festschrift für Rudolf Zocher zum 80. Geburtstag,FrommannHolzboog, Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 1967, pp. 263–282. An abridged version of this paper was presented to the 65th Annual Meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Association, Chicago, May 4–6, 1967 (Abstract in the program).
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Thiel, C. (1968). The Contamination of Ontics and Semantics. In: Sense and Reference in Frege’s Logic. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-2981-9_9
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