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7307
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A thought is not psychological, but a condition of the world that makes a sentence true [Frege, by Miller,A]
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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.
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From:
report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.2
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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.
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7309
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Frege's 'sense' is the strict and literal meaning, stripped of tone [Frege, by Miller,A]
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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.
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From:
report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Alexander Miller - Philosophy of Language 2.6
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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.
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13944
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We can pull apart assertion from utterance, and the action, the event and the subject-matter for each [Cartwright,R]
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Full Idea:
We need to distinguish 1) what is asserted, 2) that assertion, 3) asserting something, 4) what is predicated, 5) what is uttered, 6) that utterance, 7) uttering something, 8) the utterance token, and 9) the meaning.
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From:
Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 05-06)
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A reaction:
[summary of his overall analysis in the paper] It is amazingly hard to offer a critical assessment of this sort of analysis, but it gives you a foot in the door for thinking about the issues with increasing clarity.
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13947
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'It's raining' makes a different assertion on different occasions, but its meaning remains the same [Cartwright,R]
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Full Idea:
A person who utters 'It's raining' one day does not normally make the same statement as one who utters it the next. But these variations are not accompanied by corresponding changes of meaning. The words 'It's raining' retain the same meaning throughout.
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From:
Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 10)
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A reaction:
This is important, because it shows that a proposition is not just the mental shadow behind a sentence, or a mental shadow awaiting a sentence. Unlike a sentence, a proposition can (and possibly must) include its own context. Very interesting!
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13946
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To assert that p, it is neither necessary nor sufficient to utter some particular words [Cartwright,R]
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Full Idea:
In order to assert that p it is not necessary to utter exactly those words. ...Clearly, also, in order to assert that p, it is not sufficient to utter the words that were actually uttered.
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From:
Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 07)
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A reaction:
I take the first point to be completely obvious (you can assert one thing with various wordings), and the second seems right after a little thought (the words could be vague, ambiguous, inaccurate, contextual)
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7725
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'P or not-p' seems to be analytic, but does not fit Kant's account, lacking clear subject or predicate [Frege, by Weiner]
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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.
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From:
report of Gottlob Frege (works [1890]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.2
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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).
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13951
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Assertions, unlike sentence meanings, can be accurate, probable, exaggerated, false.... [Cartwright,R]
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Full Idea:
Whereas what is asserted can be said to be accurate, exaggerated, unfounded, overdrawn, probable, improbable, plausible, true, or false, none of these can be said of the meaning of a sentence.
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From:
Richard Cartwright (Propositions [1962], 12)
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A reaction:
That fairly firmly kicks into touch the idea that the assertion is the same as the meaning of the sentence.
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