Frege, Gottlob (1848–1925)

Abstract

Frege's work occupies a central position within contemporary semantic and linguistic theory, epistemology and philosophical logic. Frege elaborated a comprehensive theory of meaning and reference in three articles published in the early 1890s, but what he wrote on meaning, reference, assertion, and on linguistic aspects of concepts and judgements, was intended to be a less technical exposition of his work in the philosophy of mathematics and in formal logic. Frege stuck to the principle of the part-whole correlation, applying it to the analysis of propositions; later this principle was called the ‘compositionality’ principle. The principle is used to account for the fact (1) that the truth value of a proposition results from what its component parts stand for; (2) that the (semantic) content of a proposition results from the combined contents of its component parts; (3) that we can construct new propositions out of (significant) parts of formerly uttered propositions. The center piece of Frege's ‘philosophy of language’ is his theory of Sinn and Bedeutung. The distinction – which Frege applies to proper names, to (uniquely referring) descriptions and to (simple/complex) sentences (conditional sentences; indirect speech) – serves to set off (a) the objective idea corresponding to the way an object is presented to us [= Sinn], as distinct from all kinds of subjective representations [= Vorstellungen] we can associate with an object, and (b) the object (a referent, class of referents, a truth value) in which the reference achieves its realization [= Bedeutung]. The theory has been of crucial importance for the later study of meaning and reference, and for the logical analysis of sentences. Frege's logic inspired later work in logical syntax and semantics as applied to the analysis of truth and to the construction of an ontology.