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22280 | Frege's account was top-down and decompositional, not bottom-up and compositional [Frege, by Potter] |
Full Idea: Frege's account was top-down, not bottom-up: he aimed to decompose and discern function-argument structure in already existing sentences, not to explain how those sentences acquired their meanings in the first place. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michael Potter - The Rise of Analytic Philosophy 1879-1930 03 'Func' | |
A reaction: This goes with the holistic account of meaning, which leads to Quine's gavagai and Kuhn's obfuscation of science. I recommend compositionality for everthing. |