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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'Vindication of the Rights of Women' and 'The Thought: a Logical Enquiry'

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4 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))
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 / 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.