Abstract
What is an object? A prior question: What is objecthood? Au fond, and to logic’s eye, object is a role to be played with respect to a thought (on a decomposition). It is to be a countable which that thought represent as being some way for such a countable to be; what restores the business of truth-of to that of truth outright. What plays that role for some given thought is then an object with respect to that thought. Given this, there are corresponding absolute notions, to be fit for this role, and to be fit only for this role. So the fundamental task here is identifying the conditions on playing this role at all. All this is a contribution, however limited, to a topic called ‘ontology’. This last word also occurs in the plural in several contexts. The end of this essay considers how these notions (non-countable, and the several countables) might relate, and what assumptions underlie what some have seen them to.
Highlights
What is an object? A prior question: What is objecthood? Au fond, and to logic’s eye, object is a role to be played with respect to a thought
It is worth recalling here Frege’s observation in Grundlagen (1884): it may be an intelligible question how many macadamia nuts there are in that mélange in the bowl, but not an intelligible question how many objects there are in the bowl, or the room, or my pocket
Could personalised ontology be any different? My policy has some bearing on who satisfies the concept to be admissible by Travis to his home
Summary
The first stop on Frege’s road to objecthood is what he calls a thought (a countable): what poses a determinate question of truth outright, or, as he puts it, ‘that by which truth can come into question at all’. (1918, 1919). A thought is a countable, a (partial) articulation of thoughtΛ into countables It is of the way things are (a mass) as some given way there is for this to be. The thought inherits its generality from that of this (countable) way for things to be. A given thought is distinguished from any other solely by its proprietary way of making truth turn on how things are. Party of the first part will have to be some determinate countable instance of representing-as—of just ‘that by which truth can come into question at all’; which is to say, a thought (Gedanke). A reminder: so far we are considering only how truth outright is made to turn on that mass, the way things are (or things so being). The other way around, such responsiveness is what earns one title to grasping it
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