The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 48, No. 183 April ISSN 0031-fagy FREGE’S SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT By Gary Kemp Readers of Frege could excusably reason as follows: whether or not he is correctly described as a ‘philosopher of language’, Frege advanced a theory of the structure and composition of thoughts, and of how those components function in determining the truth-values of sentences which express them. According to that theory, an atomic sentence comprising a proper name and unary predicate is true where the name and predicate denote, respec- tively, an object and a concept, and the object falls under the concept. But he also stressed that there can be no such thing as a concept which is not, as he put it, sharp: for every concept and object whatsoever, either the object falls under the concept, or it falls under its contradictory. Thus only sent- ences whose predicates are defined for every object whatsoever as argument can be true. And that seems manifestly wrong.! In what follows, I discuss two remarkable attempts, recently advanced by Joan Weiner and Tyler Burge, to dispel the appearance of a real difficulty on this point. The appearance, according to each, is due to the persisting influence of more familiar but anachronistic interpretations of Frege’s work both urge the re-interpretation of central Fregean doctrines in such a way as I refer to the works of Frege as follows: Grundgseze der Artonet 1 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1962) [Gi]. The Basic Laws of Arithmetic: Exposition ofthe System, ed, and wwans. M. Furth (Univ. of California Press, 1964) [BL] Begriffuchrift und andere Auftze, ed. 1. Angele (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1964) [BE]. An English translation is included in J. van Heijenoort (ed), From Frege to Gel: a Source Book in Mathematical Logic (Harvard UP, 1967). References are to the section numbers Kicine Schifen, ed. T Angele Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1967) [A3 The Foundations of Arithmetic, trans. J-1. Austin {Northwestern Univ, Press, 1968) [F2] Nachgelasine Schrifen, ed. H. Hermes eal, (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 196g) [NS] Wissenschaflcher Brfvesl, ed. G. Gabriel eal. (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1976) {1B} Posthumous Wraings, ed. H Hermes et al. Univ. of Chicago Press, 1979) [PH] Philsophical and Mathematical Correspondence, ed. H. Hermes et al. (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1980) (AMC) Translations fom the Philosophical Wirtings of Gatlob Frege, grd een, ed. and trans. P. Geach and M. Black (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980) [TPH] Collected Papers on Mathematics, Log, and Philosophy, ed. B. McGuinness (Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1984) (CP. i an he np tg Py al a 1 iy Rone 9 ERFREGE'S SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT. 169 to reflect those deeper currents in Frege’s thought which, due to their subtlety and disaffinity from the outlook of subsequent analytical philo~ sophy, have escaped its notice. The warning against anachronism is well taken; but I shall contest these interpretations, partly on the grounds that the deeper subtleties these authors adduce can only wilfully be read into Frege’s work, and partly on the grounds that neither is consistent with rather less subtle but far more explicit and even basic components of Frege’s general philosophical position. Indeed I shall argue that, largely owing to these com- ponents, the sharpness problem (as I shall call it) is not only inevitable but ruinous; and hence that Frege’s overall enterprise is not ultimately viable, Of course in downplaying these components the interpretations of Burge and Weiner do promise relief from that difficulty. But that signifies little, for these are avowedly attempts at fidelity, not at reconstruction {in any case I believe that as reconstructions they would lack the intrinsic strength to justify the proposed alterations). I shall begin by indicating the Fregean philosophical commitments which I wish to stress: these concern the status which Frege assigns to logic, and the peculiar interpenetration he perceives amongst the notions of truth, judgement and assertion. I shall then explain why these components make the sharpness problem unavoidable, before turning to the discussion of Weiner and Burge. 1, Nothing is more central to Frege’s philosophical outlook than his estimate of the status of logic, He thought of that estimate as implied by the incoher- ence of psychologism, and it was essential both to the content and to the epi- stemological importance of his version of logicism. Repeatedly, from his earliest comments on the subject to his latest, Frege characterizes logic as comprising the ‘Laws of Truth’ or ‘Laws of Thought’, which pertain to ‘everything that can be thought’; they ‘prescribe universally the way in which one ought to think, if one is to think at all’? But the way in which Frege envisages the laws of logic as exerting their jurisdiction over all thought is not, as we might expect, by virtue of being about thought (or sen- tences, statements or propositions); not, in particular, by generalizing about thoughts according to their form, showing for example that all thoughts of a For these and similar charactrizatons see BG S23 ix; FA §14; PHW’pp. 128, «47, 175 4X8 pp. 199,159, 164-70, 190} CP pp. 112, 336-8, 951-2 (AS pp. 103, 320-2, 42-3) FA ti 88), $105, BL pp. 12-15 (GA r pp. x¥i-wvil). There Is not room here to argue for this interpretation, but see J. van Heijenoor, “Logic as Caleulus and Logie as Language’, Sti, 17 0967), pp. 924-30; W. Goldlarh, "Logic inthe Twenties, Journal of Sbole Lae, 44 (0979) pp. 51-685 T. Burge, Frege on Knowing the Third Realm” Mind, 100 (1992), PP- 053-50. ©The oreo Th opel Cos170 JARY KEMP given form are true, hence logically true, Logic, rather, stands in the same first-order relation to reality as any science. Frege sometimes obscures this point; at FA §87, for example, he charac- terizes the ‘laws of number’ (hence, by implication, the laws of logic), as asserting ‘connections between judgements’. But the immediate point there was to insist on the non-empirical status of arithmetic — to distinguish laws of number, which, since they contain no predicates of “external things’, are not ‘applicable’ to them, from laws of nature, which do contain such predicates. The axioms of Begrifischrift generalize about objects and concepts, not judge- ments. The universality of logic is owed to its extreme generality and abs- tractness. Whereas the laws of the special sciences set forth the facts co cerning objects and properties of some particular domain, the laws of truth set forth what holds of all objects and properties whatsoever. Logic thus enunciates those maximally general facts; it consists of those axioms and theorems derivable from them which constrain what may be true, hence be asserted, within any science, any domain of thought or reasoning. These are the ‘laws of the laws of nature’, the ‘most general laws’ (FA §87, GA p. xv). For example, whereas Newton's second law tells us that the force exerted by a material object is equal to its mass multiplied by its acceleration, Leibniz’ law tells us that for any property F and any objects « and », if x= y then if Fx then Fy. By universal instantiation, such laws enable us to derive further truths within more specific domains of knowledge. ‘These laws constitute the ultimate standards of correct argumentation, for they set out ‘what holds with the utmost generality for all thinking, what ever its subject matter’, They are given by ‘the very constitution of reason’. and can be denied only on pain of ‘complete confusion’.’ There is, then, no question of justifying them (except where provable from other logical laws); to hold them in suspense would be to renounce reason.* This is in turn what made the thesis of logicism, the establishment of which was the over-arching aim of Frege’s most productive years, so compelling. ‘The general applic- ability of arithmetic (understood to include analysis) was in Frege’s view incompatible with its deriving from any faculty of sensibility, whether a priori or empirical, for the applicability of propositions justified by any such source of knowledge could not extend beyond that source. Nothing could account for that general applicability, except that it should be included in the ‘Uni: versal Laws of Thought which transcend all particulars’ (BG Preface). Thus, if the acceptance of those laws is in some sense a precondition of though logicism identifies the ‘epistemological nature’ of arithmetic (Ga p. 4 what ma Pp. 351 (Ap. 342: PHU. 128 (NS p. gos Fi $14, See also Burge in Mind 1993 See the great polemical introduction to Grandgeris pp. xv Xvi, Russell makes the same point in The Prinaples of Mathomatis $17 The Ft Te Pie thFREC ‘SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT 17 ‘This conception of logic, whereby ‘Every proposition of Begriffeschrift expresses a thought’, contrasts sharply with the semantic or model-theoretic conception which is now standard. According to that conception, the content of logic is not itself expressed by logical formulae; logic, rather, generalizes about the statements expressible in a particular symbolic system on the basis of their form, telling us, for instance, that any instance of a given schema such as ‘Fx ~9 Fy’ is true, which is produced by substituting a denoting name and an interpreted predicate for ‘x’ and ‘F’ respectively. No singular epistemic status need be claimed for logic. An explanation of logical truth is thus available in terms of semantics, and a justification of a proof: procedure is available in terms of semantic soundness and completeness proofs. The application of logic is effected by interpreting the formalism, not by universal instantiation, Since Frege’s ‘laws of truth’ do not actually employ the notion of truth, the peculiar need of the semantic conception for that notion, for the purpose of generalizing about statements or sentences, simply does not arise (Tar- skian semantics can proceed without recognizing any semantic concepts as indefinable, but only by restricting itself to languages with finite vocabu- laries: it is doubtful that any such strategy could cope with all thought) Logic itself, then, was no obstacle to Frege’s denial that truth, strictly speak- ing, is a genuine property, something which might explicitly and irreducibly constitute the characteristic subject-matter of some science, This denial receives positive substantiation from Frege’s frequently repeated character- ization of judgement as the acceptance of a thought as true (there is also a notoriously vexing regress argument, which I shall not discuss). At various points in his writings, Frege urges that the predicate ‘ — is true’ properly attaches only to thought-names; but rather than signifying a genuine pro- perty of thoughts, it serves only as an explicit indication of assertoric force.” For, although what we accept, in judging that p, is surely the truth of p, the content of our judgement is just that p. Likewise, to assert that p is true is just to assert p. This redundancy conception of the truth-predicate and Frege's non-semantic conception of logic are thus complementary: to say that logic comprises ‘the most general laws of truth’ is to say that it comprises the most general laws, not that it concerns a distinctive property in the way that the laws of motion do.* Whereas the laws of motion contain (for example) the motion-predicate ‘x is the velocity of »’, Frege’s laws of logic do not actually contain a truth-predicate (Frege’s horizontal stroke is not a truth-predicate; CP pp. 164, 352-5 (AS pp. 150, 943-5): PH pp. 19, 294. 258-2 (NS pp. 211,252, 271-2). 1 discuss Frege's dental that truth + a property in G. Kemp, “Fruth in Frege's Laws of Truth’, forthcoming in Sythe 105 (1996). "See PHY p. 252 (NS'p. 272). Especially in some early writings, ¢.g, PHW'p. 3 (NS p. 3), Frege often obscures this © The rT Poa Con172 GARY KEMP whereas thoughts are the proper subject of the predicate ‘is tne’, the horizontal yields the value false when attached to a name of a true sentence or thought 2. Let us now consider the sharpness requirement. In view of the status Frege assigns to logic, the requirement is no mere shrill and dubiously war- ranted concern that such fallacies as that of the heap might actually arise in mathematical reasoning. Nor is it merely the observation that the employ- ment of a concept-script requires that the extensions of predicates be defined so as to ensure a truth-value for every atomic sentence. It is, rather, stantive proposition, a theorem of what is both epistemologically and ontologically the most funcam is, simply, one of the laws of truth that (Va)(VF\[Fx v ~Fx) that for any concept and any object, « the object falls under the concept, or it falls under its contradictory. A non: sharp concept-sign lacks denotation.’ And since every function-sign and every relation-sign can occur as part of some concept-sign, it follows gener- ally that there is no such thing as a function not defined for every argument. and no case in which neither a given relation nor its contradictory holds of a given pair of objects. Thus, since ‘Fa’ is true if and only ifn object denoted by the proper name falls under a concept denoted by the concept-sign, it is true only if the concept-sign is defined for every argument (and false only if its negation is true}. The trouble is obvious. Take virtually any ordinary concept-sign you like. and apparently it will not be true that you can attach any denoting proper name whatsoever to it and get a sentence which must be either true or false The implication is that precious little of what we actually think and say is true or false. There are two sorts of cases. First, some expressions, such as“: is a heap’, have indefinitely bounded extensions, and are thus neither true nor false of certain objects to which they can significant! ribed. Frege maintains that the logical misbehaviour of such expressions shows that they denote no concept, but the kinds of paradoxes engendered by ordinary conventions relating to those expressions can be generated, even if less obviously, with respect to a very wide range of ordinary predicates which we should be far from acknowledging to be defective. Take away one molecule from a stone, a bicycle or a galaxy, and it will naturally seem that what you have is still what it was, and similarly for most ordinary predicates. Second. most funetion-signs seem significantly applicable only within some proper subset of the universe of objects in ge the case of logically simple concept-signs: one could maintain that a given, simple predicate applies wherever its contradictory fails to apply ~ that, for a sub- be as eral. At most, this could be denied in PHW pp. 122, 80 (NS pp. 133, 195): CP pp. 448, 40 (AS pp. 145. 290): BL (Gili 80. Fhe Fann Te Papi etsFREGE'S SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT 173, instance, ‘The number three is hungry’ is fale rather than nonsense, and hence that it is true that the number three is not hungry. However, what plausibility this position enjoys quickly evaporates when we turn to function- signs which are not predicates, and to complex predicates involving them. There is clearly no such thing, for instance, as the square root of San Francisco, and hence no truth value for ‘Napoleon < (San Francisco)’ ~ not, at least, in keeping with anything like Frege’s account of how the truth- value of such a predication is determined. So the conjunction of Frege’s estimate of logic with his logical theory appears not to allow room for either the truth or falsity of ordinary state- ments. Even by the most minimal principle of charity, it surely follows that Frege did not see this. He writes as if he missed it. He repeatedly contrasts ‘admissibility for science’ with ‘myth’ or ‘fiction’; except for the case of ‘heap’, never is an example given of a term which is part of accepted science or of accepted common-sense truth, but which is said to lack (Fregean) de- notation." Yet he says repeatedly that logic can ‘recognize’ only sharp con- cepts, that it ‘presupposes’ their sharpness.* This is fair enough when logic is, conceived as the construction and interpretation of formal systems, for then it is part of the bargain to speak a separate or inclusive meta-language from which to assign objects to singular terms and extensions to predicates, and thus to secure, from the outside, the wholesome fodder for which such a scheme is designed. Nothing about reality or language evidently follows from, and very little is evidently presupposed by, the possibility of such an activity. But where logic is advanced as the universal ‘laws of the laws of nature’, no such external perspective is available, and logical formulae such as that asserting the law of excluded middle acquire a thoroughgoing factual portentousness; they assert that reality is really like that. It is thus misleading to speak of what logic can and cannot ‘recognize’; it has already been defined as recognizing everything. A striking example of this equivocality is the last footnote to §65 of Grundgesetze, in which Frege inveighs at length against conditional definitions, ‘It is self-evident’, he declares, ‘that certain functions must be indefinable, because of their logical simplicity. But these too must have values for all arguments.” The trouble lay concealed by Frege’s not having asked himself ‘What exactly is the force of this must?” Thave described the trouble in a very wooden sort of way, taking Frege’s explicit views at something like face value; it is natural then to wonder whether there are not subtleties in Frege’s views which might get him round " See PHW pp. 122, 186, 191, 232 (NS pp. 133, 202, 208, 50); CP pp. 226, 241, 929 (KS pp. 208, 227); PMCYIU/1 p, 63, VIII/12 p. Bo, XV/4p. 52, XV/8 p 185 (WB xi p. 96, x007 12 p. 128, xx0/14p. 152, 200/18, P24). “Ex, PHW pp. 1Bo, 229-30 (NS pp. 105, 24 856-65). TPW pp. 139-50 (GA ©The Enso The Pape oi174 GARY KEMP. it, The two attempts at rescue which I shall discuss both involve identifying such subtleties and extending them in certain ways; I shall argue that those extensions stray too far from Frege's most general and philosophically basic commitments, and further that the purported subtleties are simply not attributable to Frege. u I begin with Weiner’s interpretation, as expressed in her book Frege in Parspectice (Cornell UP, 1990). Her central thesis is that, unlike contemporary analytical philosophers of language, Frege is not concerned to present an account either of existing language or of the thought-content it embodies, but to present an epistemological ideal — the ideal of building up the exact sciences within a Begrifischrft — and to argue the epistemic importance of striving for this ideal, gradually replacing ‘unsystematic science’ with ‘systematic science’. Her account is complex, but I think we can safely single out for discussion the following components of what is very much an attempt to come to terms with the sorts of difficulties in Frege just described, According to Weiner (pp. 133-224), Frege recognized that since only sharply defined concept-signs and proper names have denotation, the signs of arithmetic, not having been previously so defined, lacked denotation. He thus held that prior to their being assigned precise meanings by the defin- itions of his Grundgesetze, mathematical statements, though they expressed thoughts, lacked denotation, and thus lacked truth-values. The implications however, are not so deleterious as one might suppose. For one thing, the propositions constituting pre-systematic arithmetic may be said to be ‘vindicated’ by the fact that what content they possessed is included in the content of their replacements in systematic arithmetic." But more import- antly, according to Weiner (pp. 227ff), Frege is committed to a category difference between science and philosophy, whereby only the former is capable of embodying truths, strictly speaking. Science, rigorous or ‘ideal’ science, is that which is expressed in a properly constructed Begrifschrft: this is to contain all the genuine factual content of science. The role of philo- sophy, for Frege, is only to elucidate, rhetorically to impress upon us what such rigorous science is like. It is not to describe language as it is in point of fact; it is not aimed at ‘objective theorizing or the establishment of truths’ Weiner p. 245). For it cannot itself satisfy the requirements of rigorous science; therefore such elucidation must fall short altogether of factual statement. It may be successful or unsuccessful in inculeating the requisite "Weiner p. 136; see also pp. 97-8, 112, 193, 228 0h ans Pe Pp! iFREGE'S SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT 75 awareness, but it cannot be true or false. Frege frankly acknowledges the ultimate ineffability of his distinction between objects and concepts ~ saying, famously, that any attempt in natural language to convey the distinction ‘must miss my thought’; Weiner's claim is that he thought of the rest of his informal writings in much the same way. His logical and semantic theory, then, and in particular the sharpness requirement, have no factual implic- ations for ordinary thought and discourse. When we say that ordinary words lack Bedeutung we are not, strictly speaking, asserting anything about the objective status of ordinary discourse; at most, we are saying that those words lack the precise definitions of the signs of systematic science This is not the place to raise merely general doubts about the intelligi bility of the notion of elucidation, of a distinction between factual and non- factual discourse according 10 which, it seems, no such distinction can actually be stated. For that, we can turn to the voluminous literature on Wittgenstein’s Tractatus. Instead, | shall first make a textual point — that Frege’s remarks on elucidation are far narrower in scope than Weiner claims — before arguing that the features of Frege’s position I have been stressing simply leave no latitude for a systematic/unsystematic distinction to play the role Weiner envisages for it Frege certainly did think of some of what he wrote as elucidation. On a number of occasions he was positively emphatic that, although it is some- times important to ensure, by means of examples or elucidation, that all investigators grasp the primitive terms of a science in the same way, that activity is not to be confused with formal definition, and indeed is not part of the content of the science at all. A passage from a letter to Hilbert is typical: I would not want to count [elucidations} as part of mathematics itself, but refer them to the antechamber, the propaedeutics. Th re similar to definitions in that they too are concerned with laying down the meaning of a sign (or word), If such a case the meaning to be assigned is logically simple, then one cannot give a proper definition but must confine oneself to warding off unwanted meanings among those that occur in linguistic usage and to pointing to the wanted one, and here one must of course always rely on being met half-way by an intelligent guess. Unlike definitions, such clucidatory propositions cannot be used in proof because they lack the necessary precision, which is why I should like to refer them to the ante-chamber. But Weiner infers too much from this. In this and other passages in which Frege explicitly discusses the role of elucidation there is nothing to indicate that he is making anything but a relatively narrow point about the dis tinction between what is primitive and what is defined in a theory; the philosophical lesson is just that only a genuine formal definition, usable in "PMC IV/s pp. 36-7 (WB xv/5 p. 63 see also CP pp. 182, 300-1 (KS pp. 167-8, 288); PHW pp. 207, 231 (NS pp. 224, 290) Th Pel Coe176 proofs, can actually be credited with showing that proven results depend on an analysis of the term defined. Elucidation is aimed at ensuring the mutual grasp amongst scientists of the undefined terms. The only clear implication of Frege’s remarks on elucidation, for an essay like ‘Uber Sinn und Bedeutung’, is that it must leave some concepts undefined — perhaps such concepts as Sinn and Bedeutung ~ not that it advances no theory. Indeed, it does not even follow from the need for elucidation that elucidatory propositions cannot be true or false; as a definition, it would be circular, for instance, to say °A conjunction is true where the first conjunct is true and the second conjunct is true’, but not thereby untrue. More cogent, then, would be to argue that since Frege did recognize that nothing he could say in his famous response to Kerry could actually state the distinction he wished to insist upon between concepts and objects, he was aware that some points in logical theory could not actually be stated: he may, then, have been prepared to extend the same verdict to his other philosophical writings. But this would again be to infer too much. The con- cept horse problem, as it has come to be known, is a very special case. The idea is to insist upon a strict and exclusive distinction of syntactic roles to be fulfilled by proper names and predicates, so that neither could sensibly occupy places occupied by the other. The distinction is ‘grounded deep in the nature of things’ rather than in linguist material mode of speech could state the requirement without violating it, and hence lapsing into nonsense." Frege perceives this very vividly, and is at pains to point out the oddity of the situation; his considered position is close to Wittgenstein’s doctrine of formal concepts, whereby something’s being, for instance, an object can only be shown by its syntactic category, not indicated by a predicate. But however problematic it may ultimately be, no immediate paradox of unsay- ability arises in the case of the doctrine of sense and denotation, and Frege never suggests that there is any such difficulty. In contrast with his frequent the writings on sense and other logical matters just do present themselves as describing how it is in point of fact with thought and language. Indeed, contrary to the impression which Weiner conveys, Frege's writings on these subjects tend to focus almost exclusively on ordinary language (rather than on a concept-script), which would be an extremely ill-conceived strategy if his real aim were not to describe the way language works in general, but only to com appreciation of what a concept-script is. Some telling examples: he points out that such a sentence as ‘Scylla has six heads’ expresses a thought but lacks truth-value because of the denotation failure on the part of ‘Scylla’ convention, but nothing in the warnings over the words ‘concept’ and ‘objec an 2» PMC XN /; pp. 1gt-2 (VB xxxi/7 p. 234)FRE HARPNESS REQUIREMENT 7 (PHW p. 225/NS p. 243); while discussing ordinary examples he says that to the sense of a predicate there also corresponds something in the realm of denotation (PHW p. 255/NS p. 275); he equates a thought’s being neither true nor false with the lack of truth-value on the part of any sentence which expresses it (PHW p. 232/NS p. 250); in §§56-67 of Grundgesetze he introduces the doctrine of definition in connection with ordinary language, and only then declares that it ‘holds good of arithmetical signs’; he declares late in life that he ‘never had any doubt that the numerals designate something’ (PHW p. 275/NS p. 295); he says that the truth-values ‘are recognized, if only implicitly, by anyone who undertakes to judge’ (CP p. 163/K3 p. 149); he says ‘If words are used in the ordinary way, what one intends to speak of is, what they denote’ (CP p. 159/A8 p. 145).!” Weiner’s position on Frege’s use of his apparent semantic vocabulary would require that virtually all of Frege’s informal work must be regarded as wantonly misleading. But the claim that Frege thought of so much of his informal work as elucidation is, so to speak, only textually problematic. What disturbs rather the substance of Frege’s thought is that Weiner thinks of this as a con- sequence of Frege's idea that only systematic science — that conducted by means of a concept-script ~ generally satisfies the constraints set down by means of such elucidation. Thus Weiner observes that, given Frege's constraints upon the denotations of concept- and function-signs, it seems inescapable that pre-Fregean arithmetical signs lacked denotation, and con- sequently that pre-Fregean arithmetical sentences lacked truth-values; but, since there is nothing peculiarly defective about the signs of arithmetic, Frege’s constraints upon denotation imply that sentences of ordinary language and existing science, all or virtually all of them, lack truth-values. In placing the systematic/unsystematic distinction at the centre of Frege’s thought, Weiner thus goes beyond accepting that Frege’s logical theory has this consequence; her claim is that Frege actually perceived and accepted it, even if he was too cunning to say so. Weiner does not say right out that Frege accepted that few if any pre-systematic sentences have truth-values, but it follows too immediately from what she does take to have been Frege’s consciously held view ~ that only in a properly constructed Begriffschrift can denotation and hence truth-telling take place ~ for there to be room for attributing the ground but not the consequence. It might be thought that there is nothing so remarkable in this; Frege would not, after all, have been the first to hold that only in the most rigorous of scientific discourse can strict truth be achieved. Descartes, for instance, held that perception has only ‘some truth in it’. Indeed, Weiner says that it does not follow from the position she attributes to Frege that pre-Fregean On Bedeutung see PMCXV/14 p. 152 (WB xxxvil14 p. 235). {© The Ess of The Pipi rt8 GARY KEMP arithmetic was simply ‘wrong’; for if what theoretical content it possessed could be preserved, but suitably augmented and sharpened, by a systematic science, then it admits of being vindicated, The same could presumably be said of any domain of discourse; an arbitrary statement could be defined as something like ‘correctly assertable’ just in case it is true on all interpreta~ tions which preserve what is determinate and unproblematic in its existing interpretation (it would be circular to define a statement as true if and only if truc on all such interpretations). Frege gives no indication of actually having held such a view, but since he plainly did think ordinary discourse unsuit- able for scientific purposes as it stands, it might be thought that, in the spirit of charitable reconstruction, he ought to be interpreted as having held it But he cannot be ~ not without the sacrifice of some of his most important and frequently stated views. In particular, it would disturb the interpenetra- tion, described in §I above, which Frege thought he had discovered amongst the notions of truth, judgement and assertion, To judge, for Frege, is ‘to ac- cept a proposition as true’; the other side of the same coin is that to ascribe the words ‘is true’ to a proposition is just to assert it, Thus, if only statements of a Begrffischrift achieve truth-values, then, wherever one is unavailable, we should, preposterously, have to refrain from judging and asserting alto- gether, Further, the redundaney-conception of the truth-predicate cludes our trying to smooth things over by saying things of the form ‘Well. do say that f; I do not say it is strictly speaking a TRUTH that p’. The proposed reconstruction does nothing to address these points, and could be advanced only on pain of abandoning Frege’s account of the wuth judgement-assertion trinity. Frege simply has no place for a region of assertion which aims at anything less than truth Some of what Weiner says might suggest that she could take another line She argues at Iength (pp. 1g0ff) that, since Frege’s philosophical work is aimed only at characterizing ideal science, Frege's Bedeutung — what I have been rendering as ‘denotation’ — should not be equated with the ordinary notion of reference, understood as a word's ‘hooking on to" an extra- linguistic entity. Thus, in order to avoid the extreme consequences just de- scribed, one might suppose that Fregean denotation is simply not to be invoked in discussing ordinary sentences (ignoring the fact that he does in- voke it); one might then suppose that ordinary sentences do in general have truth-values in virtue of what their components on some level refer to, in this ordinary sense, even if their parts do not achieve denotation, in Frege's special, technical sense. But this is not coherent. Fi laws of truth are to ‘extend to everything that can be thought’; they ‘hold with the utmost generality for all thinking’ (he also declares that he ‘cannot recognize 1th ais ot hepaFREGE’S SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT. 179 different meanings of the word “true”""), If the notion of denotation is to be involved in an exposition of the laws of truth, and ordinary sentences express truths, then the notion of denotation is appropriately invoked in connection with them. Or, to put it the other way round, if ordinary sent- ences express truths, stand in logical relationships, and so on, then whatever concepts are needed in explicating those phenomena — reference, for instance ~ are those which ought to he employed in expounding the laws of truth. It would be in terms of these that one should attempt to describe the character of a Begriffischrift, the ideal forum for truth-telling. One might resist these criticisms on the grounds that they illegitimately derive consequences from an elucidatory quasi-theory, as if it were intended as factual. But if elucidation is worth engaging in at all ~ and if Frege's informal writings are worth debating about ~ then there is no choice but to deal with it as if it were so intended. We must at any rate complain if itis nly true, not coherent, or inconsistent with what is more cert ul Burge claims to have discovered the materials in Frege necessary to address the sharpness problem more directly." Frege does not, according to him, accept the inference from our not understanding anything by a predicate which delimits a sharp concept to the conclusion that it fails to denote a ger uine Fregean concept. According to Burge, Frege holds that expressions of pre-systematic scientific discourse and even ordinary discourse do in general express logically adequate senses, and do in general achieve denotation; itis just that we are not in general fully cognizant of the senses with which we operate, and which our words express, in the self-conscious way which would be achieved by systematic or ideal science. We perceive the sorts of difficulties T have been discussing only because we assume that if the users of an expression, taken either individually or collectively, neither apprehend clearly and distinctly a definite sense nor determine one by their use of the expression, then the expression has no definite sense. This manifests a contemporary naturalistic tendency to regard sense or meaning as neces- sarily being shown forth by linguistic practice or intuition, a tendency which on Burge’s reckoning is quite foreign to Frege. Fregean sense is not to be equated with linguistic meaning. It may be that no amount of considered articulation of linguistic meaning will elicit the senses we engage with in using our words as we do, "PMC I11/g p. 20 (WB iv/ p. 94). It might be objected that this remark is being pulled out of context 7. Burge, ‘Frege on Sense and Linguistic Meaning’, in D. Bell and N. Cooper (eds), The Analytic Tradition (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), pp. 30-60. (©The es Tr Pl tn180 GARY KEMP Of course this will seem a dark and gratuitous doctrine unless some positive account is sketched of what does make it the case that we are thinking with this sense rather than that. But Burge finds such a account in Frege: Frege believes, he claims (p. 49; see also pp. 48, 51), that the senses with which we operate are those which would be brought to light by a full analysis of an ideal and complete true theory of the world: Frege’s view [is] that the ultimate foundation and justification of current linguist practice may supplement ordinary understanding in such a way as to attach it to a definite sense that no one may currently be able to articulate adequately, or thoroughly grasp. The presupposition is that some of our practices are founded on a deeper rationale or on deeper aspects of “reality” than a have presently understood... Frege must sce full understanding as guaranteed only by a completely Fundamental and completely satisfactory theory Reflexive conceptual clarity may have to await thoroughgoing knowledge of what is the case, but this could not be so if judgements were not already taking place which embodied those concepts. It seems to follow that there must be a mode of cognitive engagement, with the right set of concepts, which is prior to the achievement of that sort of clarity One of Burge’s aims is the need to solve the ‘interpretative puzzle’ presented by the seemingly disastrous consequences of Frege’s strictures on denotation. His case is based almost entirely upon certain passages from the monograph ‘Logic in Mathematics’, in which Frege describes unimpeach- ably competent users of words which express certain senses as grasping those senses only tenuously, or as if perceiving them through a haze. Frege speaks in this way so as to make it intelligible that there should be such gross errors as those made by many of his contemporaries ~ none other than Weierstrass is the stalking-horse ~ in their analyses of basic mathematical concepts. Such thinkers are seduced into believing their definitions to be adequate, when in fact nothing of mathematical consequence follows from them: their belief that their definitions are adequate, Frege supposes, is sustained, not by find- ing the latter to engender the right consequences, but by being covertly guided by a correct but implicit ‘inkling’ of the notions they purport to lyse. Such thinkers engage with the sense in a way sufficient for the practice of arithmetic, but without completely understanding it. Thus the in- definiteness of linguistic intuition does not entail that no determinate sense is actually grasped. I shall not question the intrinsic plausibility of such a view, focusing in- stead upon the following objections: (1) that it represents only a very partial solution to the sharpness problem; (2) that it renders the notion of sense incapable of fulfilling its most explicitly advertised purpose; (3) that the texts cited by Burge do not actually support its being attributed to Frege. The Eu The Pap enFREGE'S SHARPNESS REQUIREMENT 181 1. That our logical and mathematical powers spring from our contact with abstract entities which we may be unable to articulate is a claim of long-standing cogency. But outside logic and mathematics its plausibility lapses precipitously: where less abstract notions are concerned ~ the concept of a house, a mountain or a river — sense is surely just the conventional meaning determined by practice, actual and potential. But this fact is crucial: the problem generated by the ‘requirement’ that concepts must be sharp was that it is actually a substantive theorem of that science which is presupposed by all science, all knowledge. Burge’s proposal does nothing to show how, consistently with Frege’s position, everyday statements might acquire truth-values. 2, In the main discussions in ‘On Sense and Meaning’ and ‘On Function, and Concept’, the peculiar office of the notion of sense was to take up the apparent cognitive slack amongst co-denotational terms, thereby identifying those differences as objective.” But if a thought need not be transparent to the thinker who is, nevertheless, in a position to affirm or deny it, then subjective impressions of cognitive difference need not so readily be thought to betoken differences of objective content, This not only prevents the notion of sense from playing the epistemological role for which it was most cogently recruited. It threatens to undermine what ought t0 be a quite innocuous version of a Fregean standard for individuating senses ~ that the senses of ‘6’ and ‘c’ differ where ‘A believes that ... b.” and ‘A believes that ¢...” are logically independent (this is weaker than the principle whereby thoughts differ when it is possible rationally to affirm one but deny the other). Ifa thought need not be distinctly apprehended in order to affirm or deny it, then there is no reason to exclude the possibility that one might believe the thought expressed by *.. 6...” but deny that expressed by *..¢.., when in fact they are the same thought. That Frege regarded that standard of individuation as something more than contingently true is indicated by a claim he often repeats about judgement: when we judge, according to Frege, we are ‘poised between opposites’; to judge is to commit oneself, to choose amongst mutually exclusive alternatives, so that “The acceptance of [the thought} and the rejection of [its negation] are one and the same’."” By definition, then, just as a woman torn between two suitors cannot he said to have chosen until she rejects one of them, we cannot judge that p but also that not-p. Such a claim seems absolutely right if the object of judgement is io "See, for instance, the discussion in ‘Function and Concept’ (CP pp. 144-5/48 p. 132), Frege also argues thus in “On Sense and Meaning’ (CP pp. 157-8/43 pp. 143-4}, GA §2: PHW p. 192 (NS pp. 208-), and in letters to Peano (PMC XIV/1t pp. 127-8/ WB xxxiv/11 pp. 196-7) and Jourdain (PMC VIIL/12 p. 8o/ WB p. 128), PHW pp. 7-8, 149, 185, 198 (NS pp. 7-8, 161, 201, 216-17); CP pp. 380-5 (KS pp. 369-74) 1 Theos The Ppl Qi,182 GARY P conceived as what is explicitly understood by the judging subject, but if not, then it is surely contentious 3. OF course Burge is well aware of these points, and is himself a leading promulgator of the central realization of recent philosophical semantics, that a person’s state of understanding, on any untendentious conception of ‘understanding’, cannot in general be sufficient for determining the truth- conditions of what that person says. Perhaps it has come to seem incredible that it should be, but that is not the issue. The issue is whether there is anything in Frege’s work to suggest that he accepted that those things might come apart (even where indexicality is not involved). And I think it clear that Burge has misappropriated the passages which form the textual ca the claim that he did. The passages, it will be recalled, concerned the plight of otherwise exemplary mathematicians such as Weierstrass, who advance grossly unsatisfactory definitions of mathematical terms which they none the less use correctly; Burge infers that this betrays a want of understanding of those terms on their part, thus showing that, in Frege’s view, fuzziness of understanding does not entail non-sharpness of sense. Frege does speak of such mathematicians as being ‘unclear’ on concepts, and he says such things as that Weierstrass’ sentences ‘express true thoughts, if they are rightly understood’. But, as we shall see in a moment, there is a crucial sort of ambiguity in such words as ‘understanding’ and ‘clarity’, which shows Burge’s inference to be unwarranted, The underlying purpose which is exercising Frege in this discussion is to grind the old axe about the nature of definition. People typically assume that the correctness of a definition can be recognized by how it seems to us when we grasp it. Nothing could be further from the wuth. The substance of Frege’s divorce of cognition from phen- omenology, and of its corollary, the context principle, can be summed up by saying that neither thought, nor thinking abou! thought, is like perception, as if a thought were like a mental image, or a kind of picture or diagram, held before the mind’s eye." What shows a definition to be correct, rather. is that you can prove the right theorems with it, and nothing else. Weierstrass, presumably unmindful of the exemplar provided by his arithmetical de- finition of limit, had given a logically useless explication of the natural numbers and arithmetic operations, because he had appealed to psychologi- cal processes and intuitive images rather than logically relevant conceptual content; his attention had wandered into the inner psychological ‘peep- show’, as Frege had put it in Grundgesetze (PHW’ p. 217/NS p. 234). Nothing trotted out from there could ever serve as a logical analysis of a concept of "See PHW’ pp. 137. 144-6 (NS pp. 149 38-60. Sec also G. Kemp, ‘Salmon on Fre Philosophical Studies, 78 (1995). PP. 153-62 156-8): CP pp. 371-2 (KS pp. 361 2) FA S26, igean Approaches to the Paradox of AnalysisFREGE'S HARPNESS REQUIREMENT 183 arithmetic, however useful as elucidation it might be. But, by the same token, the inadequacy of such an explication does nothing to cast serious doubt on Weierstrass’ grasp of the relevant concept. It is not so much an unsuccessful attempt at definition as a confused endeavour with no clearly conceived purpose. That someone should make that sort of mistake has nothing essentially to do with his grasp of a concept; he is in a muddle about definition, not about arithmetic (and it is not just that he cannot define ‘de- finition’; what he calls ‘definitions’ are no such things). That is what Frege means by saying that Weierstrass ‘lacks the ideal of mathematics’. There is nothing to suggest that if Weierstrass knew what definition was — possessed the ideal — he would be any less well placed than Frege himself to give ad- equate definitions. His, so to speak, first-order understanding of arithmetical signs is manifested by what propositions involving the concept he accepts as true and what propositions involving it he is prepared to infer from others." Since Weierstrass actually operates in these ways with arithmetic concepts as well as anyone, this is simply not a case of someone who operates with a sharp sense but whose employment of that sense is vague. He stumbles, as it were, not when thinking with the sense, but when asked to think about the sense, to give a definition. Burge’s idea, by contrast, was to give content to something still more extreme; the proposal was that the sense employed by a person might be sharp when his employment of it was not, thus sorting out the difficulty we have been discussing in Frege’s position. The inability of Weierstrass to define a given concept which he does employ sharply ~ or as, sharply as anyone ever employs a concept ~ does nothing to show how words which are not used precisely can nevertheless express sharp senses. “That was the gap in Frege’s picture that wanted filling ‘Thus that exemplary users of an expression should take a wrong defin- ition for a right one, or vice versa, does not show that understanding or linguistic intuition is inadequate as a guide (o sense. The only linguistic intuitions relevant to the sense/linguistic-meaning relation would be those providing evidence for what would be said, in the material mode of speech, in hypothetical situations. Burge has said nothing to show that Frege thought that that sort of evidence could not adequately reveal the senses actually expressed by words. Thus I cannot see that he has shown that Frege’s position is not undermined by the sharpness problem, It is true, as Burge says in support of his claim that Frege thinks that most words do express denotation-determining senses, that ‘Frege repeatedly writes as if fic- tion and serious mistakes are the primary sources of failures of denotation’. I suggest that the explanation of this which best respects the letter of Frege's " Sce PHW’p, 222 (Np. 240) Mh tl Fe Papel ra nag184 GARY KEMP writings is that Frege never quite saw, or would not acknowledge, that the severe demands imposed by his logic and theory of meaning cannot, accord- ing to his philosophical conception of logic, be withheld from any region of thought or discourse. Or he too readily assumed that normally those con- ditions are met. To say this is quite different from saying that Frege actually harboured the ‘secret doctrine’ that ‘nearly all sentences in actual use, strictly speaking, express neither truths nor falsehoods’, as Burge imagines, (p. 37) an opponent of his interpretation, such as Weiner, might suppose. Vv ‘There is justice in both Weiner’s and Burge’s admonitions not to assimilate Frege’s concerns too readily to those of con of language. But it would be surprising if the best way to protect the integrity of Frege’s work from that sort of arrogation were to discover in it a previously overlooked subtlety which transforms its entire aspect. Such a dis- covery would in any case assort very oddly with Frege’s great and exemplary lucidity, indeed his avowed earnestness not to gain the kind of immunity 10 incisive criticism afforded by sententiousness or equivocality.2” What neither Burge nor Weiner considers with due care is the less stirring, but not merely jejune, hypothesis that Frege simply failed to see, or failed to acknowledge, the collision between his universalist logic and its accompanying account of meaning and objective cognition. Whether this was self-deception, or failure of perception, we are truer to what Frege prized most in intellectual matters to find, in his position, an unacceptable consequence implied by a set of clearly enunciated and individually compelling doctrines, than we are if we conclude that he sought to avoid it by surreptitiously holding a more re-~ condite doctrine which can only very problematically be claimed w be expressed in what he wrote -mporary analytical philosophy Chiversity of Waikato ‘See the Introduction to Grundgeset2, especially pp. xix-xxiv; also the reviews of Schubert Cohen, Schroder and Biermann, and the later attack on Thomae (Renewed Proof of the possibility of Mr Thomae’s Formal Arithmetic) all in CP (AS, The rs Ty spt!