Combining Philosophers

Ideas for Pittacus, Mengzi (Mencius) and Gottlob Frege

unexpand these ideas     |    start again     |     choose another area for these philosophers

display all the ideas for this combination of philosophers


7 ideas

18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 1. Thought
We grasp thoughts (thinking), decide they are true (judgement), and manifest the judgement (assertion) [Frege]
     Full Idea: We distinguish the grasp of a thought, which is 'thinking', from the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought, which is the act of 'judgement', from the manifestation of this judgement, which is an 'assertion'.
     From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.329 (62))
Thought is the same everywhere, and the laws of thought do not vary [Frege]
     Full Idea: Thought is in essentials the same everywhere: it is not true that there are different kinds of laws of thought to suit the different kinds of objects thought about.
     From: Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884], Intro)
     A reaction: Different kinds of thinker might also be candidates for different laws of thought. I'm unsure of Frege's grounds for this claim; most continental philosophers would probably reject it.
Many people have the same thought, which is the component, not the private presentation [Frege]
     Full Idea: The same thought can be grasped by many people. The components of a thought, and even more so the things themselves, must be distinguished from the presentations which in the soul accompany the grasping of a thought.
     From: Gottlob Frege (Review of Husserl's 'Phil of Arithmetic' [1894], p.325)
     A reaction: This is the basic realisation, also found in Russell, of how so much confusion has crept into philosophy, in Berkeley, for example. Frege starts down the road which leads to the externalist view of content.
Thoughts have their own realm of reality - 'sense' (as opposed to the realm of 'reference') [Frege, by Dummett]
     Full Idea: For Frege, thoughts belong to a special realm of reality, which he called the 'realm of sense' and distinguished from the 'realm of reference'.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1
     A reaction: A thought is, for Frege, a proposition. There is a halfway Platonism possible here, where the 'realm' for such things exists, but within that realm the objects might be conventional, or some such. Real possible worlds containing fictions!
A thought is distinguished from other things by a capacity to be true or false [Frege, by Dummett]
     Full Idea: On Frege's view, what distinguishes thoughts from everything else is that they may meaningfully be called 'true' and 'false'.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.2
     A reaction: A lot of thinking is imagistic, and while the image may or may not truly picture the world, we tend to think that the truth or otherwise of daydreaming is simply irrelevant. Does Frege take all thought to be propositional?
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 6. Judgement / a. Nature of Judgement
We don't judge by combining subject and concept; we get a concept by splitting up a judgement [Frege]
     Full Idea: Instead of putting a judgement together out of an individual as subject and an already previously formed concept as predicate, we do the opposite and arrive at a concept by splitting up the content of possible judgement.
     From: Gottlob Frege (Boole calculus and the Concept script [1881], p.17)
     A reaction: This is behind holistic views of sentences, and hence of whole languages, and behind Quine's rejection of 'properties' inferred from the predicates in judgements.
18. Thought / A. Modes of Thought / 9. Indexical Thought
Thoughts about myself are understood one way to me, and another when communicated [Frege]
     Full Idea: When Dr Lauben thinks he has been wounded, ..only Dr Lauben can grasp thoughts determined in this way. But he cannot communicate a thought which only he can grasp. To say 'I have been wounded' he must use 'I' in a sense graspable by others.
     From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 16.1
     A reaction: [compressed] This seems to be the first, and very influential, attempt to explain the unusual and revealing semantics of indexicals. It seems to be the ultimate source of 2-D semantics, by introducing two modes of meaning for one term.