Joan Weiner.Taking Frege at His Word

Abstract

In Taking Frege at his Word, Joan Weiner proposes a wide-ranging re-thinking of Frege’s philosophical and mathematical projects. She begins by outlining what she calls the Standard Interpretation of Frege, which involves four complex and interrelated claims: Of course, it seems likely that few Frege scholars accept all four of the above claims in exactly the way that Weiner formulates them. But it also seems right to say that most contemporary Frege scholars accept most of the claims that Weiner cites, or accept slight modifications of them (of course, the bits that are rejected will vary from one scholar to the next). In short, the Standard Interpretation does seem to codify those aspects of Frege scholarship where there is widespread (although not unanimous) agreement. Weiner’s attack on the Standard Interpretation is ambitious. She does not merely attempt to argue against one or two of these four theses, or merely attempt to show that some pair in the list above are inconsistent. Instead, she argues that each of these four claims is deeply mistaken in some way (and, for some of them, in multiple ways). According to Weiner, the entire Standard Interpretation is flawed — it all must go.