In the Beginning

This chapter presents a general account of the pure business of being true, otherwise put, of what is so of truths and falsehoods merely by virtue of their being that. It introduces Frege’s notion of a thought and of the thought’s logical and ontological priority, the idea that whole thoughts come first and are multiply decomposable, other items in the business of being true to be understood in terms of their role in such decompositions. It also discusses his idea of winnowing the psychological from the logical, and the distinction between generalities and particular cases.

Concepts

At the start Frege had not decided what a concept was to be, but knew well what a concept was supposed to do: to relate to objects which ‘fell under it’ in a fundamentally different way than a name relates to what it names. Such was to be the foundation of his account of quantificational logic. In the end two notions of concept emerge, one on which a concept has representational ‘intent’, another on which it does not. Some notions of unsaturation are discussed. The most natural of these fit what does have predicative intent. (This not all to the good.)

Truth

This chapter attempts to understand Frege on the irreducibility of thought, relatedly the indefinability of truth. It unpacks his central argument for this and sets it in the context of a wider enterprise. It also tries to explain why, within the business of truth-transmission any content in the notion true should remain invisible, and points to a different business (truth-yielding) in which substantial content in the notion comes into view. A central concern here is with an argument of Frege’s for the indefinability of truth. This argument can be seen as part of a case against the reducibility of ‘intentionality’ to something else. It is officially a case for making the fundamental player in the business of being true a truth bearer, but not a content-bearer (rather a content itself).

Objecthood

An object is whatever satisfies a call for completion by what predicates (engages in the business of truth-of). Object need not be a category, can be a relational notion. It is intrinsic to an object to have a capacity to recur. Therefore it must participate in the relation of identity. For this it is important that it be beleuchtbar in indefinitely many ways, but never allseitig.

Concept and Object

Frege propounded a doctrine on which the distinction between object and concept has the form of a traditional distinction between categories: what can be said of the one cannot so much as be said of the other. This idea has been philosophically influential. It has inspired various doctrines on various supposed limits of making sense, the general thought being that when one tries to stand back too far from the phenomenon of thought itself, one gets involved in what might be issues of self-reference in a way that blocks saying anything at all. So much philosophy is saying nothing at all. Which might be true anyway. But the core idea rests on a mistake. It fails to take account of the relational and functional nature of the notion object.

The Limits of Neutrality

For Frege logic is topic-neutral and thinker-neutral. Its laws, for him, are thus immune to be borne on by anything outside of logic itself, and thus to being or have been any other than they are. This chapter examines those two notions of neutrality and their limits. It locates logic in a particular restricted area of the object of the capacities of a rational being. It then asks how much of this can really be immune to thinker-specificity. It also draws on ideas of Leibniz, Reichenbach, and Putnam to cast doubt on the supposed consequences of topic-neutrality (or anyway offers a different understanding of what topic-neutrality might be).

Logic

The main question here is how logic is to be conceived. Borrowing terms from Warren Goldfarb, two conceptions are considered: universalism, schematicism. There is also a perhaps third conception. Borrowing a term from Frege, it is called the Verschmelzung conception. A question, then, is what conception fits the ‘logic’ expressed in Begriffsschrift in Grundgesetze v. I. The answer is, ‘strictly speaking neither’. Grundgesetze is an unfolding of the idea that the law-likeness of being true is, in first instance, at the level of Bedeutung. This creates a predicament for Frege, which he deals with only partly successfully. Frege sees himself as unfolding an insight that the laws of truth operate in first instance at the level of Bedeutung. His elaboration, however, makes for serious problems.

Sinn

There are two things Sinn might be: first, a generic spanning two cases: an expression’s meaning what it does; a thought’s being the one it is. Second, a notion applying only to this second case. Occasionally (notably 1906) Frege hesitated between the two, or exchanged the one with the other. Such is a lesson in how and why not to do so. The chapter also discusses the issue of how thoughts are to be counted. One point here is that thoughts must be counted such as to fulfill their role in proof adequately, thus to restrict the notion of truth-transmission to the case where a sequence of truth-transmitting transitions amounts to proof. There is also a discussion of Russell and his rejection of the idea of Sinn.

Thought’s Publicity

For Frege it is as central as anything to thoughthood that thoughts be public—not proprietary to any given thinker. That they cannot be is inherent in their intrinsic capacity to recur. Such confers on them an indefinitely extensive footprint in the nature of things. Thus Frege’s dictum: ‘With the step by which I gain an environment I make myself susceptible to error.’

Bedeutung

Chapters 1–4 unfolded Frege’s general, fruitful, picture of the business of being true. Chapter 5 concerns some elaborations of that picture, in 1891–1895, with an eye on his then-central project: proving arithmetic to be logic. Here we find some interesting false steps, culminating in his technical notion, Bedeutung. This chapter examines and unravels some of these. They involve his treatment of the notion function, correlatively, a radical (but not properly motivated) syntactic revisionism, the conflation of two different sorts of Bedeutung, one having to do with evaluation and transmission of truth value, the other having to do with forming a representation, something to be either true or false.