Document Type : Research Paper
Authors
1 Associate Professor of Philosophy Department, Mofid University
2 MA of Western Philosophy, Mofid University
Abstract
Philosophy of language and its problems are among the most important and challengeable topics in contemporary philosophical thought. Discussion about the sense of a sentences is one of these important debates. Gottlob Frege explains the sense of a term as the form of the representation of its reference. He calls the sense of a sentence a “thought” and believes that the reference of a sentence is determined by its truth value.
In this article, at first, we develop a new approach to the notion of thought. To reach this aim, some of Frege’s logical and epistemological presuppositions and also the properties of thought from his point of view will be examined. Then, on the basis of a vague relation that Frege supposes between a thought and its owner his view is criticized. Finally, we will criticize Frege’s opinion about true essence and the inessential properties of thoughts. It will be shown that Frege’s interpretation of these notions is incomplete and makes the notion of thought problematic.
Keywords
- Beaney, Michael (1996), Frege: Making Sense, London: Duckworth.
- Frege, Gottlob (1956), “The Thought: A Logical Inquiry,” Mind, New Series, Vol 65, No. 59, pp. 289-311.
- Mendelsohn, Richard L. (2005), The Philosophy of Gottlob Frege, New York: Cambridge University Press.
- Newen, Albert & Ulrich Nortmann & Rainer Stuhlmann-Laeisz (ed.) (2001), Building on Frege: New Essay on Sense, Content, and Concept, Stanford: Center for Study of Language and Information (CSLI).
- Noonan, Harold W. (2001), Frege, A Critical Introduction, Cambridge: Polity.
- Sullivan, Arthur (ed.) (2003), Logicism and the Philosophy of Language: Selection from Frege and Russell, Mississauga: Broadview Press.
- Textor, Mark (2011), Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Frege on Sense and Reference, New York: Routledge.
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