Frege: Assertion, Truth and Meaning

Abstract

In ‘Der Gedanke’, Frege argues that the supposition that truth is definable generates a vicious regress; further, he takes the regress to cast doubt on whether the truth-predicate can correctly be said to indicate a property at all (CP 353 /KS 344–5; cf. PW 128–9, 131, 142–6, 174 /NS 139–40, 142–3, 154–8, 189–90).¹ Clearly one can generate a vicious regress under certain assumptions about the relation between p and p is true. For example, we might equate true propositions with facts, and thereby assume that the question ‘What is truth?’ is really the question ‘What is it for an arbitrary truth, fact or state of affairs to be realized?’; this would be as it were the generalization of the question ‘What is it for the cat to be on the mat?’. In that case, if the realization of a state of affairs is actually analyzed as the possession, by a proposition p, of the property truth, then we are saying, for example, that the cat’s being on the mat actually consists in a certain proposition p’s having the property truth; but then this latter proposition’s being the case — that p has the property truth — must consist in its having the property truth, and so on. This would be, as it were, the general case of what Russell called a regress of analysis. Alternatively, though even less cogently, we can generate what we might more loosely characterize as an ontological or metaphysical regress. Someone might suppose that if p,then this fact is not to be analyzed as the possession, by p, of the property truth, but that it depends upon it. This would get the ontological dependence the wrong way: obviously in the sequence p, p is true, p is true is true, and so on, the ontological dependence must proceed from p to its successors, not the other way round. The cat’s being on the mat does not depend upon its being true that the cat is on the mat.

Ancestors of this paper were read at the Prague International Logic Colloquium, 19 September 1996, The University of Glasgow, 10 February 1997, The University of Sheffield, 12 February 1997, and the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association in Berkeley, 28 March 1997. For comments and other instruction I especially thank David Bell, Dorothy Grover, Peter Hylton, Terry Parsons, Dave Truncellito, and Nick Zangwill.