4 Frege, Dedekind and the Definition of Number

The importance of historical elucidation can be illustrated by considering

Frege’s
central concern, the analysis of number, a concern that he shared with his
contemporary, Richard Dedekind, whose own work, Was sind und was sollen
die Zahlen? (1888), appeared between the publication of Frege’s Grundlagen
(1884) and the publication of the first volume of Frege’s Grundgesetze (1893),
and was influential in the development of Frege’s ideas. Frege’s Grundlagen
opens with the complaint that no one, up to then, has properly understood what
numbers are, and as noted above, the first three parts of the book consist in a
criticism of various earlier views of number. Frege discusses the views of,
among others, Euclid, Kant, Leibniz, Mill, Hankel, H. Grassmann, Newton,
Schröder, Locke, Berkeley, Hobbes, Hume, Thomae, Descartes, and Jevons. His
source for many of their works is the two-volume collection edited by Johann
Julius Baumann, Die Lehren von Zeit, Raum und Mathematik, published in
1868, which might make one reluctant to regard Frege as a genuine historian of
philosophy, searching out previous views for himself. He is also largely critical
of those views, and generally insensitive to what might have motivated them.
But even if his source is second-hand, and he shows little sign of interpretive
charity, historical elucidation is what he is supplying, deliberately preparing the
way for his own positive account. A number statement, we eventually learn in
§46, more than half-way through the book, is an assertion about a concept. But
without the preceding critique, we would not really understand what this
conception amounts to, and how it is an advance on earlier views.
This can be illustrated in the particular case of existential statements,
which, on Frege’s account, are number statements involving the number 0 (cf.
GL,§53). To say that unicorns exist, for example, is to assert that the concept
unicorn is instantiated, i.e. to deny that the number 0 applies to the concept
unicorn. Frege’s view is often encapsulated in the claim that ‘existence is not a
predicate’; but unless we had some understanding of the dif ficulties that arise in
treating existence as a predicate – most notoriously, in the ontological argument
for the existence of God – then we would not appreciate Frege’s claim.9
In Part IV of the Grundlagen, he then develops his positive account,
defining the numbers in terms of extensions of concepts. His definitions of the
numbers 0 and 1, for example, can be formulated as follows:

(E0) The number 0 is the extension of the concept ‘equinumerous to the

concept
not identical with itself ’.
(E1) The number 1 is the extension of the concept ‘equinumerous to the
concept
identical with 0’. (Cf. FR, 118–19.)
But these definitions are far from immediately compelling. Could anyone even
understand them, let alone judge that they are true and capture the essence of
the natural numbers, without prior elucidation? Frege admitted himself that his
definitions ‘will hardly, perhaps, be clear at first’ (GL,§69), and would strike
people as ‘unnatural’ (GL, xi). A similar admission was made four years later by
Dedekind, who also sought to define the numbers in terms of what he called
‘systems’, cor responding to Frege’s extensions of concepts: ‘in the shadowy
forms which I bring before him, many a reader will scarcely recogniz e his
numbers which all his life long have accompanied him as faithful and familiar
friends’ (1888, 791). Clearly, there are other considerations that need to be
understood in order to judge the legitimacy of the definitions. As Frege put it,
‘To those who might want to declare my definitions unnatural, I would suggest
that the question here is not whether they are natural, but whether they go to the
heart of the matter and are logically unobjectionable’ (GL, xi). We might agree;
but whether they go to the heart of the matter is not something that can be
appreciated without historical elucidation.
In the Grundlagen, Frege had himself expressed doubts about the appeal
to
extensions of concepts (cf. GL,§68, fn.; §107). By the time of the Grundgesetze,
however, he had convinced himself that the appeal was unavoidable, a
conviction
he encapsulated in his infamous Axiom V, which asserts the equivalence
between
the following two propositions:

(Va) The function F has the same value for each argument as the function G.
(Vb) The value-range [Werthverlauf ] of the function F is identical with the
value range of the function G. (Cf. GG,I,§§3, 9.)

Since concepts, according to Frege, are functions whose values are truth-values,
Axiom V entails the equivalence between the following instantiations of (Va)
and (Vb):

(Ca) The concept F applies to the same objects as the concept G.

(Cb) The extension of the concept F is identical with the extension of the
concept G.

Admittedly, Frege still expressed unease about whether Axiom V could really be
taken as a logical law, but he saw no other way of providing arithmetic with
foundations (GG, I, vii; cf. GG, II, §147; PMC, 213). The appeal to extensions
of
concepts was justified precisely to the extent that Axiom V was legitimate.
 What convinced Frege? One reason is almost certainly the publication of
Dedekind’s Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen? in the intervening period. We
know that Frege took it as the text for discussion in the mathematical seminar
that he organiz ed at Jena during 1889–90 (cf. Kreiser 2001, 295–6). Although
published four years after Frege’s Grundlagen, Dedekind’s monograph was
written independently of it. As Dedekind mentions in his 1893 preface to the
second edition, he only became aware of Frege’s book a year after the
publication of his own. Although there are problems in Dedekind’s conception
of a ‘system’,10 his introduction of what are essentially extensions of
concepts would surely have reinforced Frege’s own thinking.11
However, the dif ferences between the two projects are no less important,
and Frege’s recognition of these dif ferences was also influential in the
development of his work. The key methodological dif ference is Dedekind’s
appeal to abstraction in deriving the natural numbers from an arbitrary ‘simply
infinite system’, as Dedekind called it. According to Dedekind, if, in
considering such a system, ‘ordered by a mapping φ we entirely neglect the
special character of the elements, simply retaining their distinguishability and
taking into account only the relations to one another in which they are placed by
the ordering mapping φ , then these elements are called natural numbers or
ordinal numbers or simply numbers’ (cf. 1888,§6,no.73). Frege had already
criticiz ed, in the Grundlagen, the idea of abstraction as somehow generating
featureless ‘units’ (GL,§§34–9), and he was to heap further scorn on abstraction
in the Grundgesetze and elsewhere (cf., e.g., GG, II, §99; RT ). But, one might
say, what Frege did was not so much to outlaw abstraction as to make it
logically respectable, respectability that was to be achieved through Axiom V.
This comes out most clearly in §147 of Volume II of the Grundgesetze, in the
context of Frege’s attempt to distinguish his own method of ‘constructing’
value-ranges, and hence numbers, from the methods adopted by, among others,
Dedekind.
People have indeed clearly already made use of the possibility of
transformation that I have mentioned; only they have ascribed coincidence to
functions themselves rather than value-ranges. When one function has in
general the same value as another function for the same argument, it is usual to
say: ‘the first function is the same as the second’ or ‘the two functions coincide’.
The expression is dif ferent from ours, but all the same here too we have an
equality holding generally transformed into an equation (identity).
Logicians have long since spoken of the extension of a concept, and
math-
ematicians have used the terms set, class, manifold; what lies behind this is a
similar transformation; for we may well suppose that what mathematicians call
a set (etc.) is nothing other than an extension of a concept, even if they have not
always been clearly aware of this.What we are doing by means of our
transformation is thus not really anything novel; but we do it with full
awareness, appealing to a fundamental law of logic. And what we thus do is
quite dif ferent from the lawless, arbitrary construction of numbers by many
mathematicians.
If there are logical objects at all – and the objects of arithmetic are such objects
–then there must also be a means of apprehending, of recognizing, them. This
service is performed for us by the fundamental law of logic that permits the
transformation of an equality holding generally into an equation. Without such a
means a scientific foundation for arithmetic would be impossible. For us this
serves towards the ends that other mathematicians intend to attain by
constructing new numbers. ... Can our procedure be termed construction?
Discussion of this question may easily degenerate to a quar rel over words. In
any case our construction (if you like to call it that) is not unrestricted and
arbitrary; the mode of performing it, and its legitimacy, are established once for
all. And thus here the dif ficulties and objections vanish that in other cases make
it questionable whether the construction is a logical possibility; and we may
hope that by means of our value-ranges we shall attain what has been missed by
following any other way. (GG, II, §147; FR, 278–9.)
Dedekind is not the only person Frege has in mind here, and Frege’s target is
also the ‘construction’ of the real numbers through Dedekind cuts, as set out in
Dedekind’s earlier Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen (1872), as well as the
‘creative definitions’ of Hermann Hankel and Otto Stolz (see GG, II, §§138–
46). But it clearly shows just how deeply Frege’s own work on the foundations
of arithmetic presupposed and implicated the work of others. Even though Frege
treated Axiom V as a logical law – indeed, as one of his basic logical laws – he
still felt the need to of fer historical elucidation.
Axiom V was intended to legitimiz e Frege’s appeal to extensions of
concepts in defining the natural numbers. Although, as noted above, Frege’s
conception of extensions of concepts and Dedekind’s conception of systems are
similar, Dedekind did not himself choose any particular set-theoretic
construction by means of which to define the natural numbers; rather, ‘the’
natural numbers were identified with the elements of a kind of ‘abstracted’ set.
So why did Dedekind of fer a dif ferent account? According to Dedekind, sets
or classes have dif ferent properties to numbers themselves. We do not talk
ordinarily, for example, of numbers ‘containing’ other numbers, or of having
‘members’, although we do talk of every natural number having a successor.
Identifying the numbers with sets or classes or extensions of concepts accords
them properties that they do not in fact have; and what is required of a definition
is that it captures what we take as their essential properties. 12
Now there are various ways in which one might go in clarifying,
defending or developing Dedekind’s conception.13 But what this shows, in the
case of Dedekind too, is the role that historical elucidation plays in the
foundational enterprise – in the articulation and explanation of the most basic
conceptions and methodologies. Dedekind is clearly sensitive to existing
practice – to our use and talk of numbers, from the natural numbers right up to
the complex numbers – and
critically aware of alternative attempts to ground that practice. The foundational
dispute between Frege and Dedekind is as much a battle for the soul of our past
and present arithmetical practice as it is the establishment of a new order – or
more accurately, that battle is an essential part of the establishment.