Abstract
Discussion of Frege’s theory of fiction has tended to focus on the problem of empty names, and has consequently missed the truly problematic aspect of the theory, Frege’s commitment to the view that even fictional sentences that contain no empty names fail to refer. That claim prima facie conflicts with his commitment to the cognitive transparency of sense, and the determination of reference by sense. Resolving this tension compels us to recognize that fiction for Frege is a special kind of force, and that words express a sense capable of picking out a referent only in the presence of the appropriate assertoric force. In effect, Frege’s theory of fiction reveals his commitment to an act-centered rather than an expression-centered semantics.
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Notes
The numbers directly following a Frege quotation are the page numbers of the relevant text cited in the reference section. The second number is to the page number in Beaney (1997). I use the following abbreviations: A Brief Survey of my Logical Doctrines—BSLD, On Sinn and Bedeutung—SB, Letter to Russell—LR, Comments on Sinn and Bedeutung—CSB, Introduction to Logic—IL, Logic in Mathematics—LIM.
The appropriate translation of these terms has become so vexed a question that I propose to avoid it as far as possible by using the original German. The exception to this rule occurs when I quote translations from Beaney (1997) which often use ‘sense’ for Sinn and sometimes translate Bedeutung as reference.
For instance CSB 1969:133–134/178 or again in Frege’s letter to Russell from the 13th of November 1904 (Beaney: 291–292).
For an intermediate view, see his Letter to Russell from the 28th of December 1902: “In poetry too there are thoughts, but there are only pseudo-assertions” (256).
This is expressed most explicitly in the Introduction to Logic 208/293-4 “Let us just imagine that we have convinced ourselves, contrary to our former opinion, that the name ‘Odysseus’, as it occurs in the Odyssey, does designate a man after all. Would this mean that the sentences containing the name ‘Odysseus’ expressed different thoughts? I think not. The thoughts would strictly remain the same; they would only be transposed from the realm of fiction to that of truth. So the object designated by a proper name seems to be quite inessential to the thought-content of a sentence which contains it.” See too SB 1892:33/157 “The thought remains the same whether ‘Odysseus’ has a Bedeutung or not”.
See too BSLD 1969:214/300 or the Thought 1918:63/330.
In accepting this interpretation of Frege, I clearly depart from interpretations according to which de re senses are object-dependent. This strength of the determination thesis would be unpalatable to, for instance, McDowell (1977, (1984) and Evans (1982). The attribution of the determination thesis to Frege, though widespread, is not uncontroversial even beyond McDowell and Evans. See Zais (1993) for resistance to it and a partial summary of the debate.
Readers who believe this to be a sensible enquiry should see Chisholm (1911) for discussion of contested identifications of the root.
See Puryear (2013) for a discussion of the more general difficulties that arise from attributing to Frege the view that vague or indeterminate predicates have no Bedeutung.
Again, it could be argued that this routinely happens in the case of indexicals and demonstratives. See May (2006) for a discussion of this in the Fregean context and an argument that the sense of indexicals and demonstratives constrain rather than present referents.
Zouhar (2010) considers a homonymic version of this view which he terms the “double language hypothesis”. He rejects it on the basis of a passage in the Logic in which Frege writes as though the same thought can be expressed in fictional and factual contexts, and on the basis of its undue complexity. Mark Textor’s 2011 view could also be read as an instance of the homonymy view: fictional names are distinguished by their fictional force. The force a name has is determined by the intentions of the individual who introduces the name. Emphasizing Frege’s comments that the sense of a term remains the same whether the individual it purports to name turns out to exist or not, whilst denying that a single word can have multiple senses implicitly commits Textor to the view that some fictional names are homonyms of factual counterparts. These homonyms have the same sense, but different force.
I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for directing me towards this point.
Dummett (1973, p. 33) “The sense of a word thus consists in some means by which a reference of an appropriate kind is determined for that word”.
What, then, of questions and commands that are uttered within fictitious contexts? In a fictional context sentences fail to refer regardless of the form of the utterance in question. Such utterances are, then, inhibited from referring twice over—once in virtue of their status as a command or a question, and again in virtue of their occurrence in a fictional conversational context. Fiction functions as an overarching category of force that includes within it subcategories of sentence: imperatival, interrogative and assertoric. The presence of assertoric intent on the part of the speaker only makes a relevant difference if the sentence itself is one already capable of expressing a thought.
Frege further indicates that even within an assertoric conversational context, individual assertoric sentences may have constituent parts that are not themselves asserted. See, for instance, the Negation, in which he writes of conditionals “Of the two component thoughts contained in the whole, neither the antecedent nor the consequent is being uttered assertively when the whole is presented as true. We have then only a single act of judgment, but three thoughts, viz. the whole thought, the antecedent, and the consequent” (Negation 1918:145-6 / 348). This does however pose a further puzzle: how can these constituent parts contribute to the truth-conditions of the whole sentence unless they have a truth-value? And how can they have such a truth-value without being asserted?
How are we to square this comment with the interpretation offered above? Two positions present themselves at this point. On the one hand, we might reasonably reject a principle of interpretation which demands that every comment Frege made on fiction over the course of a long philosophical career should be forced into a strait-jacket of consistency with one another. The cost of arriving at the most coherent interpretation of Frege may be the need to accept occasional moments of confusion on his part. In this instance, it is plausible that Frege did not adequately distinguish in his own mind at certain points between bedeutungslosen words, and fiction. That insufficiently clear distinction causes him to talk loosely as though inadvertent use of the former would constitute a foray into the latter.
What if we are not content to accept such a lacuna? One way of squaring talk of accidental entry into the realm of fiction would be to adapt the picture in the following way. There are two distinct routes into the realm of fiction. One is the use of a bedeutungslosen term, which prevents the sentence from determining a truth-value, irrespective of the intentions of the language user. The second is through the absence of assertoric force and the presence of fictional force instead. According to this view Frege had, in effect, a bifurcated view of fiction. Though this approach avoids attributing any momentary confusion to Frege, the textual evidence for it is rather slight to support such a considerable amendment.
I am grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this possibility.
Another way of avoiding the strong position that individual communicative intentions or conversational purposes play a role in determining the Bedeutung of a sentence is as follows. Instead of thinking of the role of context in terms of particular speech acts, we could instead think of the kind of context in play more broadly, in terms of a generalized fictional or non-fictional context, abstracted away from any more particular context of utterance. On this picture, words have a sense relative to a context. A sentence could then have both a fictional and an assertoric sense associated with it. Context merely decides which is relevant in the case of a particular utterance. This view admits context sensitivity whilst allowing that a sentence has its semantic properties independently of what we may do with it as language users: a sentence continues to express the same proposition, relative to a context, irrespective of our use of it. I am again grateful to an anonymous referee for suggesting this possibility.
Or course, Frege lacks the modern semantic machinery that underpins this alternative. He lacks the apparatus of context-types understood as abstract semantic objects presupposed by this approach. Frege writes that “...the question still arises, even about what is represented in the assertoric sentence-form, whether it really contains an assertion...” (Thought 1918:62/330) The answer to that question is decided for Frege by particular contexts of utterance, by whether a sentence is uttered on stage or not, for instance, or whether it features in a piece of fiction or non-fiction. This Kaplanian line of thought remains however, an elegant and parsimonious twist on the account I attribute to Frege.
See too IL 1969:208/293-4, LR 28 December 1902:256.
Another way of thinking about this is as follows. Determination is compatible with their being other conditions that must be met for an utterance to pick out a referent. Similarly, we might say that the information sent to a printer determines what document it will print. That doesn’t mean that the printer will print a document regardless of whether it has the necessary ink and paper. Just so, here the Sinn decides what referent a term may pick out, but that doesn’t mean it will pick out that referent regardless of the force of the utterance in question.
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Acknowledgments
This paper has benefited enormously from the input of two anonymous referees. I am in addition grateful to Zoltán Gendler Szabó, Susanne Bobzien and Jason Stanley for comments on earlier drafts, and to Bernard Salow for helpful discussion. I am also indebted to Sebastian Bender for his assistance with the German.
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Munton, J. Frege, fiction and force. Synthese 194, 3669–3692 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1117-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-016-1117-x