Kingston Philosophy Café

At 19:00 Dr Fiona O’Doherty will give an introduction to Gottlob Frege. For the joining instructions of this online Zoom meeting, please email kingstonphilosophycafe@gmail.com.

According to Locke, ideas exist independently of words, which serve merely as their vehicles. Locke’s emphasis on individual words, as well as the foundational role he assigned to psychology, were attacked by the German logician Gottlob Frege (1848–1925), who is generally regarded as the father of modern philosophy of language. Primarily a mathematician, Frege’s interest in language developed as a result of his attempt to devise a logical notation adequate for the formalization of mathematical reasoning. As a part of this effort, he invented not only modern mathematical logic but also a groundbreaking philosophical theory of meaning. The fundamental notion of this theory is that the meaning of a sentence—the “thought” it expresses—is a function of its structure, or syntax. The thought, in turn, is determined not by the psychological state of the speaker or hearer—thoughts are not “mental” entities—but by the logical inferences the sentence permits. Sentence meaning, furthermore, is prior to word meaning, in the sense that the meanings of individual words are determined only by what they contribute to the thoughts expressed by the sentences in which the words appear. (This idea had in fact been anticipated by the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham [1748–1832].) Frege’s theory of sentence meaning explains how it is possible for different people to grasp the same thought—such as The North Sea covers an area of 220,000 square miles—though no two people associate the corresponding sentence with exactly the same ideas, images, or other mental experiences.