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Frege on Thoughts and Their Structure

Frege on Thoughts and Their Structure José Luis Bermúdez, University of Stirling Thoughts are essentially structured. That much is agreed by almost everybody who finds it useful to talk about thoughts. Consequently, any account of the nature of thoughts must incorporate an account of their structure. Frege’s is the most comprehensive and worked-out account of the nature of thoughts, but recent work has cast doubt on whether he can be credited with a coherent conception of how they are structured. In an extremely interesting series of exchanges David Bell and Michael Dummett have investigated Frege’s views on the relation between thoughts and the concepts of which they are composed. Both authors have identified tensions in Frege’s views in this important area and proposed emendations to smooth out the apparent inconsistencies. The difficulties stem from Frege’s simultaneously holding both that the structure of a thought is isomorphic to the structure of a sentence and that two structurally different sentences can express the same thought. In the case of Bell, the proposed cure looks as if it might well kill the patient. Bell ends his latest contribution by proposing a distinction between thoughts and the senses of sentences such that the analysis of a sentence no longer http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis Brill

Frege on Thoughts and Their Structure

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Publisher
Brill
Copyright
Copyright © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
ISSN
2666-4283
eISSN
2666-4275
DOI
10.30965/26664275-00401006
Publisher site
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Abstract

José Luis Bermúdez, University of Stirling Thoughts are essentially structured. That much is agreed by almost everybody who finds it useful to talk about thoughts. Consequently, any account of the nature of thoughts must incorporate an account of their structure. Frege’s is the most comprehensive and worked-out account of the nature of thoughts, but recent work has cast doubt on whether he can be credited with a coherent conception of how they are structured. In an extremely interesting series of exchanges David Bell and Michael Dummett have investigated Frege’s views on the relation between thoughts and the concepts of which they are composed. Both authors have identified tensions in Frege’s views in this important area and proposed emendations to smooth out the apparent inconsistencies. The difficulties stem from Frege’s simultaneously holding both that the structure of a thought is isomorphic to the structure of a sentence and that two structurally different sentences can express the same thought. In the case of Bell, the proposed cure looks as if it might well kill the patient. Bell ends his latest contribution by proposing a distinction between thoughts and the senses of sentences such that the analysis of a sentence no longer

Journal

History of Philosophy and Logical Analysis – Brill

Published: Apr 5, 2001

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