Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Frege's logic
- 2 The separation of the psychological from the logical
- 3 To break the power of words over the human mind
- 4 The thought
- 5 The reference of sentences
- 6 Judgement and knowledge
- 7 The reference and sense of names
- 8 Frege's contributions to epistemology
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - The thought
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Frege's logic
- 2 The separation of the psychological from the logical
- 3 To break the power of words over the human mind
- 4 The thought
- 5 The reference of sentences
- 6 Judgement and knowledge
- 7 The reference and sense of names
- 8 Frege's contributions to epistemology
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
It is only by the discovery of the distinction between sense and reference that the notion of thought gets a more clear-cut form. Although Frege uses the term ‘thought’ more or less in the same way as the term ‘judgeable content’ before this discovery, the notion of thought, used within the framework of the theory of sense and reference, differs considerably from his earlier conception, as he himself points out, claiming that the judgeable content “has now split for me into what I call ‘thought’ and ‘truth value’” (BL I, X/6). If there was such a split, then the earlier notion of judgeable content or thought must have contained both, but in a confused and nonperspicuous way. As far as truth value is concerned, the connection is easily detected. Although Frege did not point it out explicitly, a judgeable content is either true or false. Given its constituents of the most simple form, a particular object and a concept, the object either falls under the concept or it does not, and the judgeable content is either true or false. For this reason, a sentence does not express a thought at all if one of its constituents has no “content”. Given this conception of a judgeable content, Frege was justified in claiming that there is an intimate relation between a judgeable content and a truth value, and that the latter notion can be extracted from the former.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Frege's Theory of Sense and ReferenceIts Origin and Scope, pp. 76 - 114Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1994