display all the ideas for this combination of texts
11 ideas
7728 | Frege has a judgement stroke (vertical, asserting or judging) and a content stroke (horizontal, expressing) [Frege, by Weiner] |
Full Idea: Frege distinguished between asserting a proposition and expressing it, and he introduced the judgement stroke (a small vertical line, assertion) and the content stroke (a long horizontal line, expression) to represent them. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.3 | |
A reaction: There are also strokes for conditional and denial. |
16881 | The laws of logic are boundless, so we want the few whose power contains the others [Frege] |
Full Idea: Since in view of the boundless multitude of laws that can be enunciated we cannot list them all, we cannot achieve completeness except by searching out those that, by their power, contain all of them. | |
From: Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879], §13) | |
A reaction: He refers to these laws in the previous sentence as the 'core'. His talk of 'power' is music to my ears, since it implies a direction of explanation. Burge says the power is that of defining other concepts. |
7622 | In 1879 Frege developed second order logic [Frege, by Putnam] |
Full Idea: By 1879 Frege had discovered an algorithm, a mechanical proof procedure, that embraces what is today standard 'second order logic'. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Hilary Putnam - Reason, Truth and History Ch.5 | |
A reaction: Note that Frege did more than introduce quantifiers, and the logic of predicates. |
7729 | Frege replaced Aristotle's subject/predicate form with function/argument form [Frege, by Weiner] |
Full Idea: Frege's regimentation is based on the view of the simplest sort of statement as having, not subject/predicate form (as in Aristotle), but function/argument form. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege | |
A reaction: This looks like being a crucial move into the modern world, where one piece of information is taken in and dealt with, as in computer procedures. Have educated people reorganised their minds along Fregean lines? |
9950 | A quantifier is a second-level predicate (which explains how it contributes to truth-conditions) [Frege, by George/Velleman] |
Full Idea: The contribution of the quantifier to the truth conditions of sentences of which it is a part cannot be adequately explained if it is treated as other than a second-level predicate (for instance, if it is viewed as name). | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by A.George / D.J.Velleman - Philosophies of Mathematics Ch.2 | |
A reaction: They suggest that this makes it something like a 'property of properties'. With this account it becomes plausible to think of numbers as quantifiers (since they do, after all, specify quantities). |
9991 | For Frege the variable ranges over all objects [Frege, by Tait] |
Full Idea: For Frege the variable ranges over all objects. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by William W. Tait - Frege versus Cantor and Dedekind XII | |
A reaction: The point is that Frege had not yet seen the necessity to define the domain of quantification, and this leads him into various difficulties. |
10536 | Frege's domain for variables is all objects, but modern interpretations first fix the domain [Dummett on Frege] |
Full Idea: For Frege there is no need to specify the domain of the individual variables, which is taken as the totality of all objects. This contrasts with the standard notion of an interpretation, which demands that we first fix the domain. | |
From: comment on Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Michael Dummett - Frege Philosophy of Language (2nd ed) Ch.14 | |
A reaction: What intrigues me is how domains of quantification shift according to context in ordinary usage, even in mid-sentence. I ought to go through every idea in this database, specifying its domain of quantification. Any volunteers? |
7742 | Frege reduced most quantifiers to 'everything' combined with 'not' [Frege, by McCullogh] |
Full Idea: Frege treated 'everything' as basic, and suggested ways of recasting propositions containing other quantifiers so that this was the only one remaining. He recast 'something' as 'at least one thing', and defined this in terms of 'everything' and 'not'. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Gregory McCullogh - The Game of the Name 1.6 | |
A reaction: Extreme parsimony seems highly desirable in logic as well as ontology, but it can lead to frustrations, especially over the crucial question of the existence of things quantified over. See Idea 6068. |
7730 | Frege introduced quantifiers for generality [Frege, by Weiner] |
Full Idea: In order to express generality, Frege introduced quantifier notation. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Joan Weiner - Frege | |
A reaction: This is the birth of predicate logic, beloved of analytical philosophers (but of no apparent interest to phenomenalists, deconstructionists, existentialists?). Generality is what you get from induction (which is, of course, problematic). |
13824 | Proof theory began with Frege's definition of derivability [Frege, by Prawitz] |
Full Idea: Frege's formal definition of derivability is perhaps the first investigation in general proof theory. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by Dag Prawitz - Gentzen's Analysis of First-Order Proofs 2 n2 | |
A reaction: In 'On General Proof Theory §1' Prawitz says "proof theory originated with Hilbert" in 1900. Presumably Frege offered a theory, and then Hilbert saw it as a general project. |
13609 | Frege produced axioms for logic, though that does not now seem the natural basis for logic [Frege, by Kaplan] |
Full Idea: Frege's work supplied a set of axioms for logic itself, at least partly because it was a well-known way of presenting the foundations in other disciplines, especially mathematics, but it does not nowadays strike us as natural for logic. | |
From: report of Gottlob Frege (Begriffsschrift [1879]) by David Kaplan - Dthat 5.1 | |
A reaction: What Bostock has in mind is the so-called 'natural' deduction systems, which base logic on rules of entailment, rather than on a set of truths. The axiomatic approach uses a set of truths, plus the idea of possible contradictions. |