Ulrich Pardey

Ruhr University Bochum | RUB · Institute of Philosophy I

In the Begriffsschrift , Frege held that identity is a relation between names, to wit, the relation of co-reference. The verdict of Frege scholarship on this conception of identity has not been favorable, to say the least; indeed, commentators including Alonzo Church, Michael Dummett, and Richard Heck have claimed that it is incompatible with ordin...

The languages in Tarski’s hierarchy avoid the liar, and so the liar no longer poses a threat to Tarski’s relative truth predicates ‘x is true in language Sn(n = 0, 1,…)’. But how can Frege manage to avoid the liar if he sticks to his absolute concept of truth? Doesn’t Frege also have to relativize the concept of truth in order to avoid the liar? Bu...

This book is intended to be an introduction to the practice of interpreting philosophical texts. By this I mean that a novice interpreter can take it as an example of the art of philosophical interpretation, using it to observe how an author engages in the practice of interpretation and in this way being introduced to that practice him- or herself....

Up to now, Frege’s argumentation has turned out to be (internally) consistent; but is it still relevant today at all? Since Frege’s objections to the correspondence theory originally have their place in the confrontation of I-truth and S-truth, we might think them to be no longer relevant. Scientific truth is now uncontroversially identified with S...

In the third paragraph of his essay ‘Der Gedanke’, Frege delivers a criticism of the correspondence theory of truth in altogether three consecutive arguments, culminating in the conclusion that the ‘attempt to explain truth as a correspondence’ fails. Subsequently he provides one more brief argument to show that ‘any other attempt to define truth’...

Dorothea Lotter commented on my interpretation of the fourth argument in my earlier book Freges Kritik an der Korrespondenztheorie der Wahrheit that since Frege does not explicitly distinguish between two kinds of circularity, reading such a distinction into the intentions of the author may require a fairly generous application of the principle of...

Frege’s distinction between absolute and relative truth takes center stage in his argumentation in the third and fourth paragraphs of ‘Der Gedanke’. In the following summary of the most important results I restrict myself to the consequences of this distinction — for my interpretation, for the common misinterpetations, and for the relation between...

In Frege’s work on the foundations of logic and mathematics, psychologism is one of his major objects of criticism. Psychologism regards logic as a part of psychology and ideas as truth-bearers. Already in the first paragraph, Frege makes sure to draw a clear line between logic and psychology: [I]t falls to logic to discern the laws of truth. […] F...

(v) A correspondence, moreover, can only be perfect if the corresponding things coincide and so just are not different things. It is supposed to be possible to test the genuineness of a banknote by comparing it stereoscopically with a genuine one. But it would be ridiculous to try to compare a gold piece stereoscopically with a twenty-mark note. It...

(vii) [Conclusion of the circle argument:] But likewise, any other attempt to define truth also breaks down.

Some parts of my interpretation, especially those concerning Frege’s first and third arguments, differ so greatly from previous interpretations that the latter do not even offer anything that could provide a departure point for the novel interpretation. Disregarding whether my interpretation is accurate, there is still the question of how one can a...

As Dummett’s exposition of Frege’s argumentation shows, he obviously reads the third and fourth arguments as regress arguments:1 […] the truth of a sentence or thought cannot […] be reduced to anything else. If, for instance, the truth of a sentence consisted in its correspondence with something, say W, then, in order to determine whether this corr...

(iv) Now a correspondence is a relation. But this goes against the use of the word ‘true’, which is not a relation word, does not contain any indication of anything else to which something is to correspond. If I do not know that a picture is meant to represent Cologne Cathedral then I do not know what to compare the picture with in order to decide...

In the following chapters I present a close reading of the actual text of the third and fourth paragraphs of Frege’s ‘Der Gedanke’. Toward this end I begin by quoting the text of both paragraphs in full and making the immanent argumentative structure of the text explicit. I have structured the text into sub-paragraphs (i) — (x) and added headings a...

(x) Now is the sense of the sentence an idea? In any case, truth does not consist in correspondence of the sense with something else, for otherwise the question of whether something is true would get reiterated to infinity.

(viii) When we predicate truth of a picture we do not really mean to predicate a property which would belong to this picture altogether independently of other things. Rather, we always have in mind some totally different object and we want to say that that picture corresponds in some way to this object. ‘My idea corresponds to Cologne Cathedral’ is...

(vi) Or does it? [= Or does truth admit of more or less?] Could we not maintain that there is truth when there is correspondence in a certain respect? But which respect? And what would we then have to do so as to decide whether something were true? We should have to inquire whether it were true that, for example, an idea and something real correspo...

In 1897, a good twenty years prior to ‘Der Gedanke’, Frege writes a piece titled ‘Logik’, which will remain a fragment to be subsequently first published only in his Posthumous Writings. Early in the text we come across a passage that is very similar to the third and fourth arguments in ‘Der Gedanke’. As before, my numbering of the arguments as the...