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Frege’s Notion of the True

March 30, 2011 by Seth Paskin 8 Comments

When we did the Frege episode, we read "The Thought", which was a new text to me and I found it quite interesting.  Even though we were supposed to be talking about other things, we got caught up on Frege's notion of 'The True'.  Specifically, we were asking ourselves what kind of ontological status 'The True' or 'Truth' had for Frege and why he didn't seem to care.

To walk myself through his reasoning, I did my usual note taking and then tried to recreate his argument.  As I am a visual person and a corporate tool, I did so in PowerPoint.  Please to enjoy:

Frege's The Thought - The PowerPoint

Basically, Frege gives a pretty good critique of a correspondence theory of truth, and then makes Truth linguistic: that is, he claims that truth is always referring to a sentence, not to things.  In fact, he says, Truth is the truth of the sense of a sentence, which is what he calls a thought.  I'll skip to the punchline and tell you that thoughts are not wholly subjective (like ideas), but also not part of the material, external world.  They are, however, how meaning gets conveyed through language in that two people can share one thought, which is expressed linguistically.  Check out the PPT, which I now realize has way more text than I remember, but uses colors and big fonts so it's not too bad.

Cheers,

--seth

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Filed Under: PEL's Notes Tagged With: Gottlob Frege, philosophy blog, The Thought, The True

Comments

  1. Burl says

    March 31, 2011 at 5:58 am

    Nice PPT, Seth. Some of what follows is also a response to the previous combox about ‘existence’ (where I mistook your intent to make it predicate rather than subject).

    In the PPT, I got stumped on the 1st line:
    “Meaning of True: [it] grammatically appears as an adjective, so a ‘thing’ cannot be true…”

    The wickyP says “In grammar, an adjective is a word whose main syntactic role is to qualify a noun or noun phrase, giving more information about the object signified.”

    Examples:

    The fish is big.

    I measured the board three times: the measurement is true.

    I wonder if some of Frege and Russell’s trouble doesn’t spring from their a priori acceptance of a materialistic/substance metaphysics. In regards to metaphysics, my friend Alfie has this to say in _Modes of Thought_

    “We thus dismiss deductive logic as a major instrument for metaphysical discussion. Such discussion is concerned with the eliciting of self-evidence. Apart from such self-evidence, deduction fails. Thus logic presupposes metaphysics.”

    In the discussion leading up to this conclusion, he describes how the logical premises to be argued are culled out and judgmentally ‘trimmed-up’ before they are employed in the logical deduction process. But it is impossible to say up front whether some of the discarded floor trimmings will not later become important in the course of the logical argument. I think this has some connection w/ Godel’s incompleteness theory.

    Reply
  2. Tom McDonald says

    March 31, 2011 at 1:35 pm

    This is great. Frege is very interesting and it seems like there’s a renaissance going on in recovering aspects of his thought that were neglected by his early Anglo proponents. About truth though I would argue that ultimately its sense involves coherence, pragmatic, and correspondence criteria. If we try to exclude any one of these aspects it just winds up throwing blood to the hounds of partisans for one or the other aspects.

    Reply
  3. Burl says

    April 1, 2011 at 7:38 am

    From MT Chap 7, “Nature Lifeless”: “The disease of philosophy is its itch to express itself in the forms, `Some S is P’, or `All S is P’.”

    Anyone wishing to read sheer poetry of philosophic clarity might check out MT, especially Nature Lifeless and Nature Alive – a work of art! Online at Mead project.

    Reply
  4. Burl says

    April 3, 2011 at 12:44 pm

    For a process interpretation of the ontology of propositions that completely leaves Frege’s linguistic turn behind, I once again urge fans to read “Whitehead’s Theory of Propositions” http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=2770

    Remember, he and Bertie Russel did Principia Mathematica, so if anyone has a warrant to criticize the positivist’s use of propositions as linguistic structures in epistemology vs ontological lures for deciding among appetitive feelings, Alfie is certainly an expert.

    Sample: “Moreover, propositions are not reducible to linguistic entities because the verbal expression, as hopelessly ambiguous, can never exhaustively express a proposition. As Kraus cogently remarks, it is the ontological state of affairs that constitutes the proposition, not the verbal form”

    Not a rant, but a theory I have recently come upon. Deleuze is said to have overheard a roomful of Anglo-positivists castigating Whitehead, and I recall Wittgenstein did too. Likewise, Bertie Russell made his career tearing Henri Bergson apart for his process views at an international philosophic gathering. As a former colleague of ANW, I suppose Bertie showed some class by sending as his proxy, Ludwig, his student, to kick Alfie in the groin.

    I firmly hold to my hunch that, just as the linguistic turn has proven a failure, we will see the phoenix-style ascendance in the coming decades of the thwarted efforts at the turn of the 20th century when process and pragmatism were in organic bloom.

    Reply
  5. Afsaneh Alisobhani says

    January 4, 2021 at 12:45 am

    Dear Seth
    I just came across this episode, I tried to click on the link for Powerpoint but the link didn’t work. Is it still available and if so, would you please share it again?

    Afsaneh

    Reply
    • Seth Paskin says

      January 4, 2021 at 10:25 am

      Hi Afsaneh
      I just clicked the link and it’s working for me. I can download and send it if you can’t access if you provide an email for me.

      Reply
      • Afsaneh says

        January 4, 2021 at 10:43 am

        Dear Seth
        Thank you for your prompt reply, it looks like I was able to download it on my phone. I just saw it and it would be a great loss for me not to have seen it. Thank you so much

        Reply
        • Seth Paskin says

          January 4, 2021 at 9:02 pm

          Great!

          Reply

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