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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'.
Gist of Idea
Thoughts have their own realm of reality - 'sense' (as opposed to the realm of 'reference')
Source
report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1
Book Ref
Dummett,Michael: 'Thought and Reality (Gifford Lectures)' [OUP 2006], p.5
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!
| 7740 | There exists a realm, beyond objects and ideas, of non-spatio-temporal thoughts [Frege, by Weiner] |
| 8162 | Thoughts have their own realm of reality - 'sense' (as opposed to the realm of 'reference') [Frege, by Dummett] |
| 9818 | A thought is distinguished from other things by a capacity to be true or false [Frege, by Dummett] |
| 16379 | Thoughts about myself are understood one way to me, and another when communicated [Frege] |
| 9877 | Late Frege saw his non-actual objective objects as exclusively thoughts and senses [Frege, by Dummett] |
| 19466 | The word 'true' seems to be unique and indefinable [Frege] |
| 19465 | There cannot be complete correspondence, because ideas and reality are quite different [Frege] |
| 19467 | A 'thought' is something for which the question of truth can arise; thoughts are senses of sentences [Frege] |
| 19468 | The property of truth in 'It is true that I smell violets' adds nothing to 'I smell violets' [Frege] |
| 19469 | We grasp thoughts (thinking), decide they are true (judgement), and manifest the judgement (assertion) [Frege] |
| 19470 | Thoughts in the 'third realm' cannot be sensed, and do not need an owner to exist [Frege] |
| 19471 | A fact is a thought that is true [Frege] |
| 19472 | A sentence is only a thought if it is complete, and has a time-specification [Frege] |