On Frege’s Concept of Being

Abstract

One of the doctrines which Frege emphasizes in his writings is the thesis that words for being, such as the English word is, are ambiguous. A large part of his philosophy can be seen as an attempt to make us realize the importance of keeping the different meanings of is apart and to catch the philosophical mistakes brought about by our failure to see the ambiguity. Jaakko Hintikka has recently argued that, except for John Stuart Mill and Augustus De Morgan, the ambiguity claim did not play any major role in philosophical thinking before Frege and Russell. ¹ What Frege and Russell accomplished was to make the ambiguity of is a cornerstone of modern first-order logic. Therefore, as Hintikka has pointed out, “anyone who uses this logic as his or her framework of semantical representation is thus committed to the Frege — Russell ambiguity thesis” (Hintikka, 1983, p. 449). Hintikka has shown that in an alternative semantical representation, namely, in game-theoretical semantics, no ambiguity claim need be made, which, of course, is not to deny that there are different uses of is. The operative question is whether the differences between these different uses have to be accounted for by assuming that one particular verb for being is ambiguous, i.e ., has several altogether different meanings.

I wish to thank Prof. Jaakko Hintikka, Dr. Lilli Alanen and Prof. Ernest LePore for helpful comments.