19 ideas
| 7740 | There exists a realm, beyond objects and ideas, of non-spatio-temporal thoughts [Frege, by Weiner] |
| Full Idea: There is, in addition to the external world of physical objects and the internal world of ideas, a third realm of non-spatio-temporal objective objects, among which are thoughts. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Joan Weiner - Frege Ch.7 | |
| A reaction: This seems to be Platonism, and, in particular, to give a Platonic existent status to propositions. Personally I believe in propositions, but as glimpses of how our brains actually work, not as mystical objects. |
| 19466 | The word 'true' seems to be unique and indefinable [Frege] |
| Full Idea: It seems likely that the content of the word 'true' is sui generis and indefinable | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.327 (60)) | |
| A reaction: This is the view I associate with Davidson, though fans of Axiomatic Truth give up defining it, and just describe how it behaves. Defining it is very elusive, but I don't accept that nothing can be said about the contents of the concept of truth. |
| 19465 | There cannot be complete correspondence, because ideas and reality are quite different [Frege] |
| Full Idea: It is essential that the reality shall be distinct from the idea. But then there can be no complete correspondence, no complete truth. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.327 (60)) | |
| A reaction: He thinks that logic can give a perfect account of truth, or at least the extension of truth, where ordinary language will always fail. I wonder what he would have thought of Tarski's theory? |
| 19468 | The property of truth in 'It is true that I smell violets' adds nothing to 'I smell violets' [Frege] |
| Full Idea: The sentence 'I smell the scent of violets' has just the same content as 'It is true that I smell the scent of violets'. So it seems that nothing is added to the thought by my ascribing to it the property of truth. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.328 (61)) | |
| A reaction: This idea predates Ramsey's similar proposal, for which, oddly, Ramsey always seems to get the credit. To a logician they may have identical content, but pragmatically they are likely to differ in context. 'True' certainly doesn't add to the thought. |
| 17435 | Objects do not naturally form countable units [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Objects do not by themselves naturally fall into countable units. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Isolation and Non-arbitrary Division [1997], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: Hm. This seems to be modern Fregean orthodoxy. Why did the institution of counting ever get started if the things in the world didn't demand counting? Even birds are aware of the number of eggs in their nest (because they miss a stolen one). |
| 17433 | We can still count squares, even if they overlap [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: The fact that there is overlap does not seem to inhibit our ability to count squares. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Isolation and Non-arbitrary Division [1997], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: She has a diagram of three squares overlapping slightly at their corners. Contrary to Frege, these seems to depend on a subliminal concept of the square that doesn't depend on language. |
| 17439 | There is no deep reason why we count carrots but not asparagus [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Why do speakers of English count carrots but not asparagus? There is no 'deep' reason. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Isolation and Non-arbitrary Division [1997]) | |
| A reaction: Koslick is offering this to defend the Fregean conceptual view of counting, but what seems to matter is what is countable, and not whether we happen to count it. You don't need to know what carrots are to count them. Cooks count asparagus. |
| 17434 | We struggle to count branches and waves because our concepts lack clear boundaries [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: The reason we have a hard time counting the branches and the waves is because our concepts 'branches on the tree' and 'waves on the ocean' do not determine sufficiently precise boundaries: the concepts do not draw a clear invisible line around each thing. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Isolation and Non-arbitrary Division [1997], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: This is the 'isolation' referred to in Frege. |
| 19470 | Thoughts in the 'third realm' cannot be sensed, and do not need an owner to exist [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Thoughts are neither things in the external world nor ideas. A third realm must be recognised. Anything in this realm has it in common with ideas that it cannot be perceived by the senses, and does not need an owner to belong with his consciousness. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.337(69)) | |
| A reaction: This important idea is the creed for modern platonists. We don't have to accept Forms, or any particular content, but there is a mode of existence which is distinct from both mental and physical, and is the residence of 'abstracta'. I deny it! |
| 21982 | I only wish I had such eyes as to see Nobody! It's as much as I can do to see real people. [Carroll,L] |
| Full Idea: "I see nobody on the road," said Alice. - "I only wish I had such eyes," the King remarked. ..."To be able to see Nobody! ...Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people." | |
| From: Lewis Carroll (C.Dodgson) (Through the Looking Glass [1886], p.189), quoted by A.W. Moore - The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics 07.7 | |
| A reaction: [Moore quotes this, inevitably, in a chapter on Hegel] This may be a better candidate for the birth of philosophy of language than Frege's Groundwork. |
| 17436 | We talk of snow as what stays the same, when it is a heap or drift or expanse [Koslicki] |
| Full Idea: Talk of snow concerns what stays the same when some snow changes, as it might be, from a heap of snow to a drift, to an expanse. | |
| From: Kathrin Koslicki (Isolation and Non-arbitrary Division [1997], 2.2) | |
| A reaction: The whiteness also stays the same, but isn't stuff. |
| 19471 | A fact is a thought that is true [Frege] |
| Full Idea: A fact is a thought that is true. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.342(74)) | |
| A reaction: It strikes me as pretty obvious that facts are not thoughts, because they concern the contents of thoughts. You can't discuss facts without the notion of what a thought is 'about'. If I think about my garden, the relevant fact is aspects of my garden. |
| 9877 | Late Frege saw his non-actual objective objects as exclusively thoughts and senses [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: Earlier, Frege divided objects into subjective, actual objective, and non-actual objective; in the 'Grundgesetze' he emphasised logical objects; but in 'The Thought' the non-actual objects become exclusively thoughts and their constituent senses. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.18 | |
| A reaction: Sounds to me like Frege was finally waking up and taking a dose of common sense. The Equator is the standard example of a non-actual objective object. |
| 19469 | We grasp thoughts (thinking), decide they are true (judgement), and manifest the judgement (assertion) [Frege] |
| Full Idea: We distinguish the grasp of a thought, which is 'thinking', from the acknowledgement of the truth of a thought, which is the act of 'judgement', from the manifestation of this judgement, which is an 'assertion'. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.329 (62)) |
| 8162 | Thoughts have their own realm of reality - 'sense' (as opposed to the realm of 'reference') [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: For Frege, thoughts belong to a special realm of reality, which he called the 'realm of sense' and distinguished from the 'realm of reference'. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Thought and Reality 1 | |
| A reaction: A thought is, for Frege, a proposition. There is a halfway Platonism possible here, where the 'realm' for such things exists, but within that realm the objects might be conventional, or some such. Real possible worlds containing fictions! |
| 9818 | A thought is distinguished from other things by a capacity to be true or false [Frege, by Dummett] |
| Full Idea: On Frege's view, what distinguishes thoughts from everything else is that they may meaningfully be called 'true' and 'false'. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]) by Michael Dummett - Frege philosophy of mathematics Ch.2 | |
| A reaction: A lot of thinking is imagistic, and while the image may or may not truly picture the world, we tend to think that the truth or otherwise of daydreaming is simply irrelevant. Does Frege take all thought to be propositional? |
| 16379 | Thoughts about myself are understood one way to me, and another when communicated [Frege] |
| Full Idea: When Dr Lauben thinks he has been wounded, ..only Dr Lauben can grasp thoughts determined in this way. But he cannot communicate a thought which only he can grasp. To say 'I have been wounded' he must use 'I' in a sense graspable by others. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918]), quoted by François Recanati - Mental Files 16.1 | |
| A reaction: [compressed] This seems to be the first, and very influential, attempt to explain the unusual and revealing semantics of indexicals. It seems to be the ultimate source of 2-D semantics, by introducing two modes of meaning for one term. |
| 19467 | A 'thought' is something for which the question of truth can arise; thoughts are senses of sentences [Frege] |
| Full Idea: I call a 'thought' something for which the question of truth can arise at all. ...So I can say: thoughts are senses of sentences, without wishing to assert that the sense of every sentence is a thought. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.327-8 (61)) | |
| A reaction: This builds on his distinction between sense and reference. The reference of every truth sentence is just 'the true', and the sense is the proposition. The concept of a proposition seems indispensable to logic, I would say. |
| 19472 | A sentence is only a thought if it is complete, and has a time-specification [Frege] |
| Full Idea: Only a sentence with the time-specification filled out, a sentence complete in every respect, expresses a thought. | |
| From: Gottlob Frege (The Thought: a Logical Enquiry [1918], p.343(76)) | |
| A reaction: I take the 'every respect' to include the avoidance of ambiguity, and some sort of perspicacious reference for the terms. I wish philosophers would focus on the thoughts in their subject, and not nit-pick about the sentences. Does he mean 'utterances'? |