What's Puzzling Gottlob Frege?

2001 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-200 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Thau ◽  
Ben Caplan
Keyword(s):  
Work Function ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Sense And Reference

By any reasonable reckoning, Gottlob Frege's ‘On Sense and Reference’ is one of the more important philosophical papers of all time. Although Frege briefly discusses the sense-reference distinction in an earlier work (‘Function and Concept,’ in 1891), it is through ‘Sense and Reference’ that most philosophers have become familiar with it. And the distinction so thoroughly permeates contemporary philosophy of language and mind that it is almost impossible to imagine these subjects without it.The distinction between the sense and the referent of a name is introduced in the second paragraph of ‘Sense and Reference.’

The Logical Study of Language

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Representational Content ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Symbolic Logic ◽  
Truth Conditions ◽  
Logical Study ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Sense And Reference ◽  
Semantic Properties

This chapter discusses the foundations of philosophical semantics, covering the work of Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell. Frege, along with Russell, did more than anyone else to create the subject. The development of symbolic logic, the analysis of quantification, the application of logical ideas and techniques to the semantics of natural language, the distinction between sense and reference, the linking of representational content to truth conditions, and the compositional calculation of the contents of compound expressions from the semantic properties of their parts are all due to Frege and Russell. Philosophy of language, as we know it today, would not exist without them.

The Philosophy of Charles Travis

2018 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Ludwig Wittgenstein ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Hilary Putnam ◽  
Perceptual Representation ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Speech Content

The work of Charles Travis belongs to the analytical tradition, yet is also radically at odds with many assumptions characteristic of the tradition. Such an approach, while being at odds with some dominant strains of thought, does speak to a strand of the analytical tradition running from Frege, through Cook Wilson, Wittgenstein, and Austin, up to aspects of contemporary thinkers as diverse as Chomsky and McDowell. This volume is the first of its kind. It collects thirteen previously unpublished papers, including one of the last papers of the late Hilary Putnam, that tackle a range of issues arising in Travis’s work, offering both critical and positive responses. The volume also includes detailed replies by Travis to each of the papers and an introductory chapter by the editors that situates Travis’s ideas in the context of contemporary philosophy of language and mind. The volume divides into three sections, relating to language, thought, and perception. Topics covered in detail include: the character of linguistic and perceptual representation; the nature and evidential role of intuitions; Gottlob Frege; Ludwig Wittgenstein; the role of context in fixing speech content; and the structure of thought.

Borges on Replication and Concept Formation

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yemima Ben-Menahem
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Concept Formation ◽  
Jorge Luis Borges ◽  
Ancient Greece ◽  
Broad Sense ◽  
Common Theme ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Common

This chapter examines three stories by Jorge Luis Borges: “Funes: His Memory,” “Averroës's Search,” and “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote.” Each of these highlights the intricate nature of concepts and replication in the broad sense. The common theme running through these three stories is the word–world relation and the problems this relation generates. In each story, Borges explores one aspect of the process of conceptualization, an endeavor that has engaged philosophers ever since ancient Greece and is still at the center of contemporary philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. Together, Borges's stories present a complex picture of concepts and processes of conceptualization.

Metaphor

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marga Reimer ◽  
Elisabeth Camp
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language ◽  
Cognitive Science ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Contemporary Philosophy ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
Linguistic Phenomenon ◽  
Rule Out

Metaphor has traditionally been construed as a linguistic phenomenon: as something produced and understood by speakers of natural language. So understood, metaphors are naturally viewed as linguistic expressions of a particular type, or as linguistic expressions used in a particular type of way. This linguistic conception of metaphor is adopted in this article. In doing so, the article does not intend to rule out the possibility of non-linguistic forms of metaphor. Many theorists think that non-linguistic objects (such as paintings or dance performances) or conceptual structures (like love as a journey or argument as war) should also be treated as metaphors. Indeed, the idea that metaphors are in the first instance conceptual phenomena, and linguistic devices only derivatively, is the dominant view in what is now the dominant area of metaphor research: cognitive science. In construing metaphor as linguistic, the article merely intends to impose appropriate constraints on a discussion whose focus is the understanding and analysis of metaphor within contemporary philosophy of language.

Language, Meaning, and Information

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Soames
Keyword(s):  
Modal Logic ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Possible Worlds ◽  
Philosophy Of Mathematics ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Bertrand Russell ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Possible Worlds Semantics ◽  
Language Meaning

This chapter is a case study of the process by which the attempt to solve philosophical problems sometimes leads to the birth of new domains of scientific inquiry. It traces how advances in logic and the philosophy of mathematics, starting with Gottlob Frege and Bertrand Russell, provided the foundations for what became a rigorous and scientific study of language, meaning, and information. After sketching the early stages of the story, it explains the importance of modal logic and “possible worlds semantics” in providing the foundation for the last half century of work in linguistic semantics and the philosophy of language. It argues that this foundation is insufficient to support the most urgently needed further advances. It proposes a new conception of truth-evaluable information as inherently representational cognitive acts of certain kinds. The chapter concludes by explaining how this conception of propositions can be used to illuminate the notion of truth; vindicate the connection between truth and meaning; and fulfill a central, but so far unkept, promise of possible worlds semantics.

Meaning in Gender Theory: Clarifying a Basic Problem from a Linguistic-Philosophical Perspective

Hypatia ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 48-68 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eva Waniek
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Basic Problem ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Linguistic Meaning ◽  
Gottlob Frege ◽  
Gender Theory ◽  
Philosophical Perspective ◽  
Gender Research ◽  
Ferdinand De Saussure ◽  
Anglo American

The author investigates the notion of linguistic meaning in gender research. She approaches this basic problem by drawing upon two very different conceptions of language and meaning: (1) that of the logician Gottlob Frege and (2) that of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. Motivated by the controversial response the Anglo-American sex/gender debate received within the German context, the author focuses on the connection between this epistemological controversy among feminists and two discursive traditions of linguistic meaning (analytic philosophy and poststructuralism), to show how philosophy of language can contribute to current feminist debates.

Frege's Contribution to Philosophy of Language

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard G. Heck ◽  
Robert May
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Essential Ingredient ◽  
Truth Values ◽  
Sense And Reference

Gottlob Frege's contributions to philosophy of language are so numerous and so fundamental that it is difficult to imagine the field without them. This article discusses Frege's apparently metaphysical doctrine that concepts are ‘unsaturated’. It argues that it is primarily a semantic thesis, an essential ingredient of Frege's conception of compositionality. It next discusses Frege's conception of truth. It argues that his seemingly puzzling doctrine that sentences denote objects, namely, truth-values, emerges from considerations about the logic of sentential connectives and the semantics of predicates and embodies an understanding of why, as Frege sees it, logic is so intimately concerned with the notion of truth. The article then turns to Frege's notion of a thought and, more generally, the distinction between sense and reference.

Pragmatics

Philosophy ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mitchell Green
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Speech Acts ◽  
Semantic Content ◽  
Literal Meaning ◽  
Communicative Interaction ◽  
What Is Said ◽  
Circular Argument ◽  
Grammatical Mood ◽  
Sense And Reference

Pragmatics is a branch of the philosophy of language as well as a field of linguistics. Pragmatics is to be distinguished from pragmatism, which is a doctrine concerning the nature of truth and knowledge. Whereas proponents of pragmatism are pragmatists, students of pragmatics are pragmaticists. Imagine a communicative interaction among two or more parties. Pragmaticists generally study that part of what is communicated that is left over after the conventionally determined, literal meaning of any words used has been subtracted out. (This is in contrast to what remains after the conventionally permitted, literal meaning has been subtracted out—see The Pragmatic Determination of What is Said) In part because pragmatics falls within the ambit of linguistics, it has an empirical, indeed an experimental dimension. Topics comprising pragmatics include speech acts (a special case of which are performatives), implicature, indexicals, presupposition, speaker meaning, and the pragmatic determination of what is said. A topic that has recently received intensive discussion and is of obvious importance to pragmatics is the very delineation of semantics from pragmatics. Other topics that have received less extensive scrutiny include expression and expressiveness and the relation of illocutionary force to semantic content and grammatical mood. In addition to the topics comprising the field, the value of pragmatics as an explanatory enterprise may be gauged by its ability to illuminate familiar communicative phenomena: among these are metaphor, irony, the significance of epithets and other “charged” language, the distinction between lying to and misleading an audience, facial expression, communicative properties of intonation, and so-called pragmatic paradoxes. Theoretical discussions of pornography have also been influenced by pragmatics. Aside from linguistics, logical theory also has a stake in pragmatics insofar as the notion of good reasoning cannot be captured simply with the notion of soundness. (A circular argument, for instance, can be sound.) Further, on the strength of certain ways of drawing the pragmatics/semantics boundary, some phenomena traditionally in the purview of semantics have been construed as pragmatic instead: among these are Frege’s distinction between sense and reference and the phenomenon of non-referring proper names. Certain semantic strategies, then, have a stake in pragmatics.

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