Dirk Greimann

It is generally assumed that Frege’s solution to the problem of referential indeterminacy in the first volume of Grundgesetze is based on a contextualist conception of reference that is spelt out by his criteria of referentiality. The present paper argues that this assumption is hardly consistent with Frege’s remarks on the task of the criteria in the second volume. They leave no doubt that the criteria are not to be understood as explanations of the concept of reference, but as explanations of the requirement that in the exact sciences all concepts must have sharp boundaries. The crux of the problem of referential indeterminacy is that, to sharply delimit the boundaries of a vague or ambiguous concept, we have almost only concepts at our disposal that also lack sharp boundaries. To solve it, we need a non-inductive method for the complete determination of concepts. It is provided by Frege’s criteria of referentiality. They define a kind of “holistic” method for the complete determination of concepts according to which vague and ambiguous concepts must be completely determined in a reciprocal manner.

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that gap. This innovative collection addresses such themes as: the relation between the concept of truth and the success conditions of assertions and kindred speech acts the linguistic devices of expressing the truth of a proposition the relation between predication and truth.

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that gap. This innovative collection addresses such themes as: the relation between the concept of truth and the success conditions of assertions and kindred speech acts the linguistic devices of expressing the truth of a proposition the relation between predication and truth.

Frege’s Caesar problem is best understood as a multidimensional problem that touches on semantical, epistemological as well as metaphysical issues. The aim of this paper is to shed light on a dimension that has been largely ignored in the literature. It is argued that Frege’s own presentation of the problem strongly suggests that the problem consists primarily in providing the concept of number with a ‘sharp delimitation’. The demand for the ‘completeness of definitions’ was already made by Frege in Grundlagen and not just in his mature period, as is generally assumed. It derives from the Euclidean goal of Grundlagen to transform the arithmetic of his time into an ‘exact science’ in the proper sense. The metaphysical problem as well as the epistemological and the semantical problem that are involved in the Caesar problem only arise because the concept of number is not sharply delimited. The latter problem must therefore be regarded as the fundamental one. Moreover, it can be shown that Frege’s definition of number presupposes that all concepts of his system are sharply delimited. This explains why he considered the solution of the Caesar problem as an integral part of his logical foundation of arithmetic.

Quine has persuasively shown that the empiricist "dogma of reductionism", which is the belief that each meaningfiil statement of science can be reduced to statements about immediate sense experience, must be abandoned. However, Quine's methodology of ontology seems to incorporate an analogous physicalistic dogma according to which the identity conditions of each scientifically respectable sort of abstract objects can be reduced to the identity conditions of physical objects. This paper aims to show that the latter dogma must be abandoned, too. In section 1, the reductionist methodology underlying Quine's prescript "No Entity without Identity" is reconstructed in detail. In section 2 and 3, this methodology is criticized on the ground that Quine's individuation of sets offendsagainst the reductive Criteria of adequacy for individuations that are presupposed by his criticism of the ontological recognition of intensional objects. Finally, in section 4 an alternative holistic conception of individuation is outlined.

This paper aims to reconstruct Kant’s derivation of the formula of the categorical imperative from its mere concept with the help of the resources of Searle’s and Vanderveken’s illocutionary logic. The main exegetical hypothesis is that the derivation envisaged by Kant consists in deriving the formula from the success conditions of categorical imperatives. These conditions, which are analogous to the success conditions of ordinary orders, contain restrictions for the successful construction of a system of moral laws that determine what the content of the categorical imperative must be.

Na sua resenha do meu artigo A Negação Fregeana do Número 2, Pedro Barbalho criticou a minha tentativa de mostrar que, dada a reconstrução da sintaxe e da semântica do sistema em Grundgesetze que apresentei num artigo anterior, a suposição de Frege de que “|Ø-- 2” é uma expressão bem-formada com um sentido e uma referência pode ser satisfatoriamente explicada. Pedro Barbalho oferece uma explicação alternativa que é sugerida pela tese Fregena no § 46 de Grundlagen de que uma afirmação sobre um número contém uma afirmação sobre um conceito. Nesta resposta, o meu objetivo é mostrar que esta estratégia para fazer sentido de “|Ø-- 2” não realmente funciona.

In his writings on the foundations of logic, Gottlob Frege, the father of modern logic, sketched a conception of truth that focuses on the following questions: What is the sense of the word "true"? Is truth a definable concept or a primitive one? What are the kinds of things of which truth is predicated? What is the role of the concept of truth in judgment, assertion and recognition? What is the logical category of truth? What is the significance of the concept of truth for science in general and for logic in particular? The present volume is dedicated to the interpretation, reconstruction and critical assessment of Frege's conception of truth. It is of interest to all those working on Frege, the history of logic and semantics, or theories of truth. The volume brings together nine original papers whose authors are all widely known to Frege scholars. The main topics are: the role of the concept of truth in Frege's system, the nature of the truth-values, the logical category of truth, the relationship between truth and judgment, and the conception of the truth-bearers.

Whereas the relationship between truth and propositional content has already been intensively investigated, there are only very few studies devoted to the task of illuminating the relationship between truth and illocutionary acts. This book fills that gap. This innovative collection addresses such themes as: the relation between the concept of truth and the success conditions of assertions and kindred speech acts the linguistic devices of expressing the truth of a proposition the relation between predication and truth.

In his logical foundation of arithmetic, Frege faced the problem that the semantic interpretation of his system does not determine the reference of the abstract terms completely. The contextual definition of number, for instance, does not decide whether the number 5 is identical to Julius Caesar. In a late writing, Quine claimed that the indeterminacy of reference established by Frege’s Caesar problem is a special case of the indeterminacy established by his proxy-function argument. The present paper aims to show that Frege’s Caesar problem does not really support the conclusions that Quine draws from the proxy-function argument. On the contrary, it reveals that Quine’s argument is a non sequitur: it does not establish that there are alternative interpretations of our terms that are equally correct, but only that these terms are ambiguous. The latter kind of referential indeterminacy implies that almost all sentences of our overall theory of the world are either false or neither true nor false, because they contain definite descriptions whose uniqueness presupposition is not fulfilled. The proxy-function argument must therefore be regarded as a reductio ad absurdum of Quine’s behaviorist premise that the reference of terms is determined only by our linguistic behavior.

In his late philosophy, Quine generalized the structuralist view in the philosophy of mathematics that mathematical theories are indifferent to the ontology we choose for them. According to his ‘global structuralism’, the choice of objects does not matter to any scientific theory. In the literature, this doctrine is mainly understood as an epistemological thesis claiming that the empirical evidence for a theory does not depend on the choice of its objects. The present paper proposes a new interpretation suggested by Quine’s recently published Kant Lectures from 1980 according to which his global structuralism is a semantic thesis that belongs to his theory of ontological reduction. It claims that a theory can always be reformulated in such a way that its truth does not presuppose the existence of the original objects, but only of some objects that can be considered as their proxies. Quine derives this claim from the principle of the semantic primacy of sentences, which is supposed to license the ontological reductions he uses to establish his global structuralism. It is argued that these reductions do not actually work because they do not account for some hidden ontological commitments that are not detected by his criterion of ontological commitment.

Frege hat über Jahrzehnte hinweg an einem Buch über die Grundlagen der Logik gearbeitet, dessen erster Teil folgenden Fragen gewidmet sein sollte: Ist Wahrheit definierbar oder ein „logisches Urelement“? Ist Wahrheit die Übereinstimmung eines inneren Bildes mit der Realität, oder ein Spezialfall der Beziehung zwischen dem Sinn eines Zeichens und seinem Bezug? Welchen Beitrag leistet der Sinn des Wortes ,wahr’ zu dem Sinn der Sätze, in denen es vorkommt? Sind die Wahrheitswerte – „das Wahre“ und „das Falsche“ – als Eigenschaften oder als Gegenstände aufzufassen? Gehört das, was wahr oder falsch ist, der Innenwelt an? Was ist eine Tatsache? Frege war jedoch weit davon entfernt, seine Konzeption der Wahrheit in die Form einer systematischen Theorie zu bringen. Sie besteht vielmehr aus einem losen und überaus komplexen Konglomerat wahrheitstheoretischer Doktrinen, die – für sich genommen – sehr unterschiedlichen und teilweise auch gegensätzlichen Richtungen der Wahrheitstheorie zuzuordnen sind. Aus diesen Gründen hat die Konzeption bisher wenig Beachtung gefunden; sie gilt als weitgehend konfus und inkohärent. Die vorliegende Studie versucht dagegen zu zeigen, daß sich die Konzeption bei genauerer Betrachtung als ein Ansatz von hoher Überzeugungskraft und systematischer Geschlossenheit entpuppt. Die exegetische Hauptthese ist, daß die Konzeption auf einem originellen Grundverständnis von Wahrheit basiert, das sich durch die Orientierung an der „behauptenden Kraft“ auszeichnet: Unter „Wahrheit“ versteht Frege das, was in der natürlichen Sprache durch die „Form des Behauptungssatzes“ ausgedrückt wird.

ABSTRACT In “Die Verneinung”, Frege discusses two types of negation, a semantic one and a pragmatic one. Semantic negation consists in the application of the logical function denoted by ‘it is false that p’ to a thought, and pragmatic negation in the act of asserting or judging a thought as false. According to the standard interpretation, Frege does not acknowledge pragmatic negation, because it is logically redundant. He therefore rejects the classical dualistic view that both truth and falsity are qualities of judgement and adopts instead the monistic view that to judge is always to recognize a thought as true. My aim in this paper is to show that this interpretation cannot be sustained. Though Frege does not endorse the classical view, he defends a dualistic conception that is characterized by the claim that judging is a binary operation that contains both the act of recognizing a thought as true and the act of rejecting the opposite thought as false. To make this interpretation plausible, Frege’s dualistic remarks on negation in three posthumous writings, which have received little attention so far, are analyzed in detail and their background is reconstructed. It is argued that Frege acknowledges negative judgements to account for the epistemic role of the act of judgement in the acquisition of knowledge. RESUMO Frege discute dois tipos de negação em “Die Verneinung” : uma semântica e uma pragmática. Negação semântica consiste na aplicação da função lógica denotada por ‘é falso que p’ para um pensamento, e negação pragmática no ato de afirmar ou julgar um pensamento como falso. De acordo com a interpretação padrão, Frege não reconhece a negação pragmática, porque ela é logicamente redundante. Assim, ele rejeita a visão dualística clássica de que tanto verdade quanto falsidade são qualidades de julgamento e, em vez disso, adota a visão monística de que julgar é sempre reconhecer um pensamento como verdade. Meu objetivo neste artigo é mostrar que tal interpretação não pode ser sustentada. Apesar de Frege não endossar a visão clássica, ele defende um conceito dualista que é caracterizado pela afirmação de que julgar é uma operação binária que contém tanto o ato de reconhecer um pensamento como verdade, quanto o ato de rejeitar o pensamento oposto como falso. Para tornar essa interpretação plausível, Frege faz observações dualísticas sobre a negação em três escritos póstumos, que têm recebido pouca atenção até o presente, são analisadas em detalhe e seu background é reconstruído. Argumenta-se que Frege reconhece o julgamento negativo para explicar o papel epistêmico do ato de julgar na aquisição de conhecimento.

According to the proximal theory of meaning, which is to be found in Quine’s early writings, meaning is determined completely by the correla-tion of sentences with sensory stimulations. Davidson tried to show that this theory is untenable because it leads to a radical form of skepticism. The present paper aims to show, first, that Davidson’s criticism is not sound, and, second, that nonetheless the proximal theory is untenable because it has a very similar and equally unacceptable consequence: it implies that the truth-value of ordinary sentences like ‘Snow is white’ is completely determined by the properties of the speaker, not by the prop-erties of the objects to which these sentences refer.

Obwohl das Explizieren von Begriffen wesentlicher Bestandteil der philosophischen Theoriebildung ist, finden sich nur wenige Arbeiten, die der Frage nachgehen, nach welchen methodischen Regeln diese Kunst auszuüben ist. Die vorliegende Arbeit will zur Schließung dieser Lücke beitragen. Es wird eine allgemeine Theorie der Begriffsexplikation skizziert, die an Vorarbeiten anknüpft, die von Geo Siegwart in neueren Schriften geleistet wurden. Die hauptsächlichen Ziele der Theorie sind: die adäquate Explikation von „Explikation“; die Bestimmung der Faktoren, von denen die Adäquatheit einer Explikation abhängt, wie z.B. die materiale Adäquatheit der Explikation und die Adäquatheit der Normen wissenschaftlicher Respektabilität, denen das Explikandum angepasst werden soll; und der Aufbau eines entsprechenden Systems von Regeln, deren Befolgung die Adäquatheit von Explikationen sicherstellen soll. Diese Regeln normieren das Explizieren in ähnlicher Weise wie die logischen Regeln das Schlussfolgern

In a posthumous text written in 1915, Frege makes some puzzling remarks about the essence of logic, arguing that the essence of logic is indicated, properly speaking, not by the word ‘true’, but by the assertoric force. William Taschek has recently shown that these remarks, which have received only little attention, are very important for understanding Frege's conception of logic. On Taschek's reconstruction, Frege characterizes logic in terms of assertoric force in order to stress the normative role that the logical laws play vis-à-vis judgement, assertion and inference. My aim in this paper is to develop and defend an alternative reconstruction according to which Frege stresses that logic is not only concerned with ‘how thoughts follow from other thoughts’, but also with the ‘step from thought to truth-value’. Frege considers logic as a branch of the theory of justification. To justify a conclusion by means of a logical inference, the ‘step from thought to truth-value’ must be taken, that is, the premis..

The Idea behind Tarski's Definition of Truth. In Tarski's presentations of his truth-definition, the steps of the construction are not sufficiently explained. It is not clear, on what general strategy the construction is based, what the fundamental ideas are, how some crucial steps work, and especially how the transition from the definition of satisfaction to the definition of truth should be understood. The paper shows that the account given in the model-theoretic literature, which is supported by Tarski's lemmata A and B, is unsatisfactory, because Tarski's notion of truth can't be interpreted as ‘truth independent of the assignment of values to the variables’. Moreover, a satisfactory account of all the crucial steps is given.

According to the standard characterization of logic in Frege’s writings, the word “true” indicates the essence of logic, as the word “good” indicates the essence of ethics and the word “beautiful” the essence of aesthetics. In a posthumous writing from 1915, however, Frege says that it is the assertoric force, and not the word “true”, which indicates the essence of logic properly. Prima facie, this correction is in conflict with Frege’s criticism of the psychologist conception of logic. For according to this criticism, logic is not the science of the laws of “being taken as true”, but the science of the laws of “being true”, while the assertoric force expresses being taken as true. In previous writings, I tried to resolve this conflict by a reconstruction of Frege’s conception of truth that is based on his thesis that truth is expressed in natural language by the “form of the assertoric sentence”. The goal of this paper is to defend this interpretation against the objections recently made by Marco Ruffino.