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Ideas for 'fragments/reports', 'On Concept and Object' and 'Necessity, Essence and Individuation'

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4 ideas

19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 2. Meaning as Mental

9167	Frege felt that meanings must be public, so they are abstractions rather than mental entities [Frege, by Putnam]
	Full Idea: Frege felt that meanings are public property, and identified concepts (and hence 'intensions' or meanings) with abstract entities rather than mental entities.
	From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Hilary Putnam - Meaning and Reference p.150
	A reaction: This is the germ of Wittgenstein's private language argument. I am inclined to feel that Frege approached language strictly as a logician, and didn't really care that he got himself into implausible platonist ontological commitments.

19. Language / B. Reference / 3. Direct Reference / b. Causal reference

15166	Causal reference seems to get directly at the object, thus leaving its nature open [Sidelle]
	Full Idea: The causal theory of reference appears to give us a way to get at an object while leaving it undetermined what its essence or necessary features might be.
	From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.1)
	A reaction: This pinpoints why the direct/causal theory of reference seems to open the doors to scientific essentialism. Sidelle, of course, opposes the whole programme.

19. Language / B. Reference / 5. Speaker's Reference

15182	Because some entities overlap, reference must have analytic individuation principles [Sidelle]
	Full Idea: The phenomenon of overlapping entities requires that if our reference is to be determinate (as determinate as it is), then there must be analytic principles of individuation.
	From: Alan Sidelle (Necessity, Essence and Individuation [1989], Ch.5)
	A reaction: His point is that there is something inescapably conventional about the way in which our reference works. It isn't just some bald realist baptism.

19. Language / D. Propositions / 2. Abstract Propositions / a. Propositions as sense

4974	For all the multiplicity of languages, mankind has a common stock of thoughts [Frege]
	Full Idea: For all the multiplicity of languages, mankind has a common stock of thoughts.
	From: Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892], p.196n)
	A reaction: Given the acknowledgement here that two very different sentences in different languages can express the same thought, he should recognise that at least some aspects of a thought are non-linguistic.