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PREVIEW-Episode 34: Frege on the Logic of Language

March 13, 2011 by Mark Linsenmayer 31 Comments

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:26 — 30.7MB)

This is a 33-minute preview of a 1 hr, 48-minute episode.

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Discussing Gottlob Frege's "Sense and Reference," "Concept and Object" (both from 1892) and "The Thought" (1918).

What is it about sentences that make them true or false? Frege, the father of analytic philosophy who invented modern symbolic logic, attempted to codify language in a way that would make this obvious, which would ground mathematics and science. Applying his symbolic system to natural language forced him to invent strange entities like "thoughts" and "senses" that are neither physical nor psychological, and we pretty much spend this episode kvetching about the metaphysical implications of this and the fact that Frege didn't care about them.

Featuring guest podcaster Matt Teichman, who also hosts Elucidations.

Read along: "The Thought," "On Sense and Reference," "On Concept and Object," and we also read
Frege's introduction (p. 12-25) to his book The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition of the System (1904), or just buy this book.

End song: "The Great Forgotten Lover," from the 2011 New People album, Impossible Things.

Looking for the full Citizen version?

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Filed Under: Podcast Episodes Tagged With: Bertrand Russell, Gottlob Frege, logic, Matt Teichman, philosophy of language, philosophy podcast

Comments

  1. Burl says

    March 13, 2011 at 7:26 pm

    Y’all did great, as always. Now I understand the problem and milieu of ANW’s ‘eternal objects’ better.

    I am sympathetic to you guys as you had to live in the wake of the ‘Metaphysics of Alphabet’ that dominates modern philosophy – your wisdom won out as your evaluations of ‘is this subject matter and its requisite conformity worth my life energies my career?’

    Philosophy is best done avocationally.

    Reply
  2. Anh-vu Doan says

    March 14, 2011 at 12:00 am

    Ahhh yess! At last! You’ve been building up to this episode for so long, and I’ve been waiting for it, checking the site daily in hopes that the great Frege episode was up. And now it’s finally here! Thanks guys!

    Reply
  3. Ethan Gach says

    March 14, 2011 at 9:03 am

    The point you made in passing about spanish was an interesting one Mark.

    The idiosyncrasies of language make discussions of logic considered from the point of view of one language (usually English, as least recently given the development of analytic philosophy) very problematic.

    Learning a language is always hard in the beginning as the student tries to say everything in english, and then translate word for word. So for instance in english I always want to say that I “am” doing somthing or that something is, where as in spanish it’s more often that you’ll say, “I run” (vs. I am running) or “the object”feels x to me (vs. the object is x/has quality x). I’m curious how all of these early twentieth century logicians weren’t worried precisely about differences in syntax. I’m not very familiar with Chomsky and the natural syntax that underlies how languages develope, but at least in terms of “grounding” logic or anything else in language, trying to account for the seemingly endless variations in how similar meanings are conveyed would be the larger issue. For someone like Frege that can be read as suggesting a sort of platonic idealism with regard to concepts/truth, how did he get away with simply tabling the fact of multiple languages?

    Reply
  4. Tom McDonald says

    March 16, 2011 at 12:10 pm

    One of my favorite contemporary philosophers Robert Brandom on Frege:

    Q: Would you call yourself a neo-Fregean? How do you see the importance of Frege in your work and what do you think it is the main difference between your philosophy and the original Fregean project?

    Brandom:

    The closest affinities between the view of [my book] Making It Explicit and Frege’s original project (in his Begriffsschrift, of 1879) concerns the role of logic in semantics.

    Frege there defines the “conceptual content” of an expression as its role in inference.

    His “concept-script” is meant to express such inferential roles, to make explicit what follows from applying a concept, what would be evidence for it, and what is incompatible with it.

    He understands logical vocabulary, paradigmatically the conditional and negation, as having the function of making explicit the inferential connections in virtue of which even nonlogical expressions mean what they do.

    Thus “if…then…” lets us say (put into the assertible content of a claim) what follows from a claim and what is evidence for it, and “not” lets us say what is incompatible with it.

    The mathematical development of the logic Frege invented has obscured for us this original expressive function he envisaged for logic, and so, I think, much of its philosophical importance. I aim to recover this aspect of his original vision.

    Frege followed Kant in emphasizing that logic (and semantics) is a normative discipline: talk about concepts is talk about how we should talk and think, not just about how we actually do.

    This insight is also very important for me. But Frege seems to have had a platonistic, ontological construal of these conceptual norms, whereas I follow a pragmatist line and see them as implicit in our practice. This is probably the greatest difference between the two approaches.

    Cheers,
    Tom

    Reply
  5. Tom McDonald says

    March 16, 2011 at 12:11 pm

    Here is a link to the Brandom interview where he discusses Frege:

    http://www.dif.unige.it/epi/hp/penco/pub/brandom_inter.pdf

    Reply
  6. gabrielle says

    March 17, 2011 at 5:41 am

    just signed up for matt’s podcast. can’t wait! great episode, guys.

    Reply
    • Seth Paskin says

      March 17, 2011 at 9:57 pm

      Thanks Gabrielle!

      Reply
  7. Burl says

    March 18, 2011 at 5:34 pm

    It’s not about logic. “Emotion is the foundation of value?. This is a Whiteheadian, Pirzigian, and, yes, now a Brookian realization…

    http://www.ted.com/talks/david_brooks_the_social_animal.html?utm_source=newsletter_weekly_2011-03-15&utm_campaign=newsletter_weekly&utm_medium=email

    Reply
  8. Legends, all of ye says

    March 23, 2011 at 7:21 pm

    wow, just wow! Great stuff, kept me entertained all the time, I may actually get my essay done in time now! Go raibh míle maith agat!

    Reply
  9. Sola Waykeen says

    March 5, 2015 at 12:58 am

    So, regarding the third realm, how about:

    universal subjective entities?

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Logic: A Quick Remedial Lesson | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 16, 2011 at 10:37 am

    […] Forums/Links « Episode 34: Frege on the Logic of Language […]

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  2. Michael Dummett on Frege: Is "the True" an entity? | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 16, 2011 at 11:11 am

    […] made heavy mention on the Frege episode of this book by Michael […]

    Reply
  3. Logicomix! | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 23, 2011 at 10:48 am

    […] the recent Frege episode, Mark related the famous anecdote of how Bertrand Russell, the man who “discovered” […]

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  4. A.J. Ayer and Bryan Magee on Frege and Russell | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 24, 2011 at 9:00 am

    […] coming in around minute 8. In part two, Ayer and Magee talk up Michael Dummett just like I did on the podcast, and then close to minute 4, the conversation shifts to Russell and stays there through most of the […]

    Reply
  5. Correction re. Episode 34′s Account of Russell on Denoting | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    April 3, 2011 at 12:10 am

    […] one point in Episode 34 (around 79:10), I made a mistake.  Oops. Might as well set it right on the […]

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  6. Partially Examined Life Podcast Topic #38: Russell on Math | The Partially Examined Life | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    April 14, 2011 at 12:46 pm

    […] come into communion with? We’ll be following up our foray into analytical philosophy with Frege with some Bertrand Russell: specifically his Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (1919), which […]

    Reply
  7. Quassim Cassam (via Elucidations) on Skepticism | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    December 5, 2011 at 11:16 am

    […] I’ve been listening of late to more Elucidations (which we’ve written about before), which features Matt Teichman from our Frege episode. […]

    Reply
  8. In Memoriam: Michael Dummett | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    January 5, 2012 at 11:34 am

    […] Frege’s work in the second half of the 20th century. [The PEL episode on Frege can be found here.  An interview of Dummett talking about Frege on Philosophy Bites can be found […]

    Reply
  9. Partially Examined Life Topic #51: Semiotics/Structuralism | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    February 10, 2012 at 10:35 am

    […] be understood in opposition to other concepts. There’s no question, as you might attribute to Frege or early Wittgenstein, of language being based ultimately on pointing out some psychologically […]

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  10. Rick Roderick on Derrida | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    March 4, 2012 at 10:53 am

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  11. Meaning and Context | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    May 31, 2012 at 10:51 am

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  12. Topic for #66: Quine on Language, Logic, and Science | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    October 17, 2012 at 11:43 am

    […] Van Orman Quine (1908–2000) was a prototypical American analytic philosopher. Following Frege, Russell, and Wittgenstein, he was concerned with how logic provides a foundation for mathematics, […]

    Reply
  13. New Thing for Sale (and Free for Members): A Reading of Russell’s “On Denoting” | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    November 23, 2012 at 12:28 pm

    […] key point of transition between our Frege episode and our very-soon-to-be-released Quine episode is Russell’s theory of definite descriptions. […]

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  14. Partially Examined Life Topic #67: Carnap on Logic/Science | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    December 7, 2012 at 12:07 pm

    […] make this clearer, I encourage listeners to go back to our Frege episode. Carnap studied under Frege, who came up with the distinction between the reference for a phrase […]

    Reply
  15. Topic for #76: Deleuze/Guattari on What Philosophy Is | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    April 26, 2013 at 9:19 am

    […] that these planes are not descriptions of an individual’s subjective world-view; like Fregean senses, these planes are intersubjective, which is the same, for these phenomenology-influenced folks, as […]

    Reply
  16. Topic for #95: Gödel on Math | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    June 7, 2014 at 11:40 am

    […] Bertrand Russell at (though in this latter case math was less of our focus than logic and language) Gottlob Frege. These folks wanted to ground mathematics as certain knowledge by creating formal systems that […]

    Reply
  17. Audiobook: Bertrand Russell’s “On Denoting” | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 6, 2015 at 6:29 pm

    […] Linsenmayer reads the 1905 article, which serves to supplement our Frege and Russell […]

    Reply
  18. Topic for #126: Saul Kripke on Possibilities, Language, and Science | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    October 20, 2015 at 7:00 am

    […] of this, Gottlob Frege (listen to our episode on this topic) distinguished between the referent of a name and its "sense," so that Ali G and Borat and Bruno […]

    Reply
  19. Topic for #128: Hilary Putnam on Linguistic Meaning | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    November 24, 2015 at 9:52 am

    […] theory of meaning put forward by Russell (whose essay about this I will read to you) and Frege, Putnam concurs with this project (and Kripke was actually riffing off of Putnam's two earlier […]

    Reply
  20. Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God? Avicenna and Aquinas on God’s Oneness | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    May 12, 2016 at 7:01 am

    […] debate thus far has revolved around a key distinction made by that great calculative intellect, Gottlob Frege: namely, the distinction between sense (Sinn) and reference (Bedeutung). The point is illustrated […]

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  21. Unicorns, Language, and Ontology | ibarfhuckabees says:
    October 12, 2016 at 12:22 am

    […] episode of PEL in question was #34 “Frege on the logic of Language”. At some point in the podcast, the lads start discussing the rather strange question of the […]

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