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Notes
The pagination cited for Frege's works is the pagination of the original publications of these works. This pagination is indicated in Geach and Black'sTranslations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, Oxford and New York, second revised ed.: 1960, and in Günther Patzig's collection of Frege's writings,Funktion, Begriff, Bedeutung (Fünf Logische Studien), Van Den Hoek and Ruprecht in Göttingen: 1962. It also corresponds, where appropriate, to the pagination of Ignacio Angelli's collection,Begriffsschrift und Andere Aufsatze, Darmstadt and Hildesheim, second ed.: 1964, and the German language side of John Austin's edition and translation ofDie Grundlagen der Arithmetik, Oxford and New York, second revised ed.: 1953. I compared the German editions of Frege's works cited here to the English translations cited here and translated the passages anew if I thought the translation could be improved.
Michael Dummett,Frege: Philosophy of Language, Harper and Row, New York: 1973, 544.
I believe that Gödel's translation ‘to signify’ of this word in ‘Russell's Mathematical Logic’, in Paul Arthur Schilpp (ed.)The Philosophy of Bertrand Russell, Harper Torchbooks, New York: 1963, is the best translation of this word available. ‘To signify’ has the appropriate slide between ‘to mean’ and ‘to denote’. Frege's use of the noun ‘Bedeutung’ in theBegriffsschrift is similar to the use of the word ‘significance’ or ‘signification’ by English speakers. Frege uses it in different places in approximately the senses of ‘importance’, ‘meaning’, and ‘denotation’. Philip E. B. Jourdain in ‘The Development of the Theories of Mathematical Logic and the Principles of Mathematics’,The Quarterly Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematics 43 (1912), 242, reports Frege as having written the following in 1910 as a note to this article. ‘A proposition (Satz) expresses (ausdrüct) a thought and signifies (bezeichnet) its truth value. Of a judgment, one can neither properly say that it is signified, nor that it is expressed. In it, however, we have a thought, and this can be expressed; but we have more, namely, the recognition of the truth of this throught.’ Bauer-Mengelberg, in footnote 8 of his translation of theBegriffsschrift, in Jean Van Heijenoort (ed.),From Frege to Gödel, Harvard University Press, Cambridge: 1967, 11, cites this as evidence that Frege did not agree with the translation of ‘bedeuten’ as ‘to signify’, since these remarks of Frege would then be incompatible with his remarks in theBegriffsschrift. However, the proper way to view the remarks by Frege in the Jourdain article is as an explanation of how his later theory differs from his theory in theBegriffsschrift. Thus, incompatibilities between his remarks in the footnote and the text are allowable. The alternative is to make Frege's theory of language more complex by claiming that there are more primitive terms than there seems to be at first sight. There is no reason to believe that Frege's theory is more complex in this manner.
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Ray, R. Frege's difficulties with identity. Philos Stud 31, 219–234 (1977). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01855228
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01855228