Combining Texts

Ideas for 'The Origin of the Work of Art', 'The Flow of Time' and 'works'

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

display all the ideas for this combination of texts

---

5 ideas

19. Language / A. Nature of Meaning / 4. Meaning as Truth-Conditions

7307	A thought is not psychological, but a condition of the world that makes a sentence true [Frege, by Miller,A]
	Full Idea: For Frege, a thought is not something psychological or subjective; rather, it is objective in the sense that it specifies some condition in the world the obtaining of which is necessary and sufficient for the truth of the sentence that expresses it.
	From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.2
	A reaction: It is worth emphasising Russell's anti-Berkeley point about 'ideas', that the idea is in the mind, but its contents are in the world. Since the contents are what matter, this endorses Frege, and also points towards modern externalism.

19. Language / C. Assigning Meanings / 5. Fregean Semantics

7309	Frege's 'sense' is the strict and literal meaning, stripped of tone [Frege, by Miller,A]
	Full Idea: Frege held that "and" and "but" have the same 'sense' but different 'tones' (note: they have the same truth tables); the sense of an expression is what a sentence strictly and literally means, stripped of its tone.
	From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.6
	A reaction: It seems important when studying Frege to remember what has been stripped out. In "he is a genius and he plays football", if you substitute 'but' for 'and', the new version says (literally?) something very distinctive about football.

7312	'Sense' solves the problems of bearerless names, substitution in beliefs, and informativeness [Frege, by Miller,A]
	Full Idea: Frege's introduction of 'sense' was motivated by the desire to solve three problems: the problem of bearerless names, the problem of substitution in belief contexts, and the problem of informativeness.
	From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.9
	A reaction: A proposal which solves three problems sounds pretty good! These three problems can be used to test the counter-proposals of Russell and Kripke.

19. Language / E. Analyticity / 1. Analytic Propositions

7725	'P or not-p' seems to be analytic, but does not fit Kant's account, lacking clear subject or predicate [Frege, by Weiner]
	Full Idea: 'It is raining or it is not raining' appears to true because of the general principle 'p or not-p', so it is analytic; but this does not fit Kant's idea of an analytic truth, because it is not obvious that it has a subject concept or a predicate concept.
	From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.2
	A reaction: The general progress of logic seems to be a widening out to embrace problem sentences. However, see Idea 7315 for the next problem that arises with analyticity. All this culminates in Quine's attack (e.g. Idea 1624).

19. Language / E. Analyticity / 2. Analytic Truths

7316	Analytic truths are those that can be demonstrated using only logic and definitions [Frege, by Miller,A]
	Full Idea: Frege (according to Quine) characterises analytic truths as those that can be demonstrated or proved using only logical laws and definitions as premises.
	From: report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 4.2
	A reaction: This is the big shift away from the Kantian version (predicate contained in the subject) towards a modern version, perhaps fixed by a truth table giving true for all values.