This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
Literary usage of a name has the sense and not the historical object as the referent.
Frege makes this distinction in his “Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung,” simply to account for the occasion of one person's reporting the words of another.Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Philosophische Kritik, 100: 28 (1892). Since all of the material used here is available in translations with original pagination in Geach's and Black'sTranslations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege, I shall refer to Frege by Original title and pagination. Church in a review of Smart's article on “Frege's Logic” (Philosophical Review, 54: 489–505) notes that Smart omitted mentioning that Frege made this distinction after he wrote hisBegriffschrift. The use of quotation marks for this purpose has a long history. See H. B. Curry, “Mathematics, Syntactics, and Logic,”Mind, 62: 174, n. 2.
“To be sure, it happens in exceptional cases that we desire to speak of the sign itself—as will occur in our examination of formal arithmetic. In order that no uncertainty shall arise, we must distinguish these two cases [when we refer to the arithmetic object and when we refer to the sign for the arithmetic object by an external mark. The most appropriate procedure is to place the signs, in the latter case, within inverted commas.”Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, Vol. II, No. 98.
For the purposes of this paper, his treatment of sentences referring to The False and the related problem of negation are omitted. See his “Der Vemeinung”;Begriffschrift, No. 7;Grundgesetze, No. 6;Funktion und Begriff.
“Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung,” pp. 34–35. “One might be tempted to regard the relation of the thought to the True not as that of sense to reference, but rather as that of subject to predicate. One can, indeed, say: ‘The thought, that 5 is a prime number, is true.’ But closer examination shows that nothing more has been said than in the simple sentence ‘5 is a prime number.’ The truth claim arises in each case from the form of the declarative sentence, and when the latter lacks its usual force, e.g., in the mouth of an actor upon the stage, even the sentence ‘The thought that 5 is a prime number is true’ contains only a thought, and indeed the same thought as the simple ‘5 is a prime number.’ It follows that the relation of the thought to the True may not be compared with that of subject and predicate. Subject and predicate (understood in the logical sense) are indeed elements of thought; they stand on the same level for knowledge. By combining subject and predicate, one reaches only a thought, never passes from sense to reference, never from a thought to its truth value. One moves at the same level but never advances from one level to the next. A truth value cannot be a part of a thought, any more than, say the Sun can, for it is not a sense but an object.”
This assumption takes us beyond the limits of this paper into Frege's treatment of concepts and involves the content of his “Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand,”Funktion und Begriff, andGrundgesetze (Vol. I, Introduction, and Nos. 1–8 especially). Contemporary treatments of the term “true” make a brief excursion in this direction desirable. But even this excursion will be limited by reference to the analytical devices of “Ueber Sinn und Bedeutung.”
Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, p. x, and throughout “Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand” andFunktion und Begriff. AlsoGrundgesetze, Introduction and first few paragraphs.
Frege is considered as one of the originators of logical analysis as it centers upon the proposition, sentence, or judgment as the source of meaning for philosophy. For this reason, Geach and Hempel group together the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Carnap, and Frege, and Wells finds so much in Frege's work that is familiar, despite the fact that his constructions are so strange. P. T. Geach, “Subject and Predicate,”Mind, 59: 461-82. C. G. Hempel, “On the Logical Positivists' Theory of Truth,”Analysis, vol. 2, 1953. R. Wells, “Frege's Ontology,”Review of Metaphysics, 4: 537-73. Also see Frege'sDie Grundlagen der Arithmetik, translated by J. L. Austin, p. 71: “Only in a proposition (Satz) have the words really a meaning.” Also p. x.
It is interesting that Russel, though he employed entirely different philosophical principles from those of Frege, clearly agrees that the word “true” cannot properly be affirmed of a sentence is quotation marks, when the quotation marks are taken to indicate that the expession is a name for the sentence itself. Also see A. Koyre's “The Liar” and Bar-Hillel's reply with Koyre's rejoinder,Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 6:344-62 and 7: 245-55. Koyre argues that the statement upon which the Liar Paradox rests is false simply because it is not a proper sentence; that is, the subject of the sentence composing the paradox (“This sentence is false”) is not a true sentence. Frege's analysis would outlaw the contemporary solution offered to the Liar Paradox. Further, for Frege, since “true” and “false’ cannot be proper parts of a sentence, the Liar Paradox could of course never arise.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sternfeld, R. A restriction in Frege's use of the term “true”. Philos Stud 6, 58–64 (1955). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02333192
Received:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02333192