Combining Texts

Ideas for 'The Fixation of Belief', 'Moral Philosophy meets social psychology' and 'On Concept and Object'

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7. Existence / A. Nature of Existence / 6. Criterion for Existence
Frege mistakenly takes existence to be a property of concepts, instead of being about things [Frege, by Yablo]
     Full Idea: Frege's theory treats existence as a property, not of things we call existent, but of concepts instantiated by those things. 'Biden exists' says our Biden-concept has instances. That is certainly not how it feels! We speak of the thing, not of concepts.
     From: report of Gottlob Frege (On Concept and Object [1892]) by Stephen Yablo - Aboutness 01.4
     A reaction: Yablo's point is that you must ask what the sentence is 'about', and then the truth will refer to those things. Frege gets into a tangle because he thinks remarks using concepts are about the concepts.