Frege: Making Sense

Frege: Making Sense

1996 | 192 | ISBN: 0715627120 | DJVU | 3 Mb

This book is concerned with the origins, development and coherence of Frege's conception of sense. The centrality of this conception to Frege's philosophy has entailed discussion of most of the main elements of Frege's thought - his logic, philosophy of mathematics, and ideas in the philosophy of logic and language and in epistemology and metaphysics; and in writing this book, I have also tried to present a balanced and accessible account of Frege's philosophy as a whole. On many topics (logicism, Platonism, vagueness, indexicality, for example), I cannot claim to have provided more than an exposition of Frege's ideas and to have identified some of the problems raised; but I hope that this in itself will encourage a deeper appreciation, even amongst those who are familiar with his ideas, of the organic unity and dynamic development of Frege's philosophy. The emergence of Frege's distinction between sense and reference marks the transition from Frege's early to his later work, and is fundamental to an understanding of the origins of analytic philosophy, yet the distinction is I frequently discussed outside the context of Frege's creation of modern logic, his attempts to think through its philosophical implications, and his overriding aim to demonstrate the logicist thesis - that arithmetic is reducible to logic. The different demands that Frege made on his notion of sense, and the resulting tensions in his philosophy, have also been insufficiently appreciated. What is located at the heart of the account offered here is an issue that has been relatively underexplored in relation to Krege's philosophy - the nature of analysis. For it was the problem of the status of Frege's logical and logicist analyses that motivated the distinction between sense and reference, and the tensions that remained in his philosophy are a result of failing to provide a satisfactory answer to the problem. ...