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Gottlob Frege's Uber Sinn und Bedeutung (`OnSense and Reference'), has come to be seen, in the century since itspublication in 1892, as one of the seminal texts of analyticphilosophy. It, along with the rest of Frege's writings on logic andmathematics, came to mark out a whole new domain of inquiry. Thisvolume bears witness to the continuing importance and influence ofthat agenda. It contains original papers written by leading Fregescholars for the conference held in 1992 in Karlovy Vary to celebratethe publication of Frege's essay. The fourteen essays show how thequestions Frege discusses in that essay connect intimately with issuesmuch debated in current philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. ... Read more

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Customer Reviews (1)

very good compilation - with one reservation
although the articles of this book are definitely of excellent quality, there is little directly on the Tractatus. The only one such is Hylton's short but quality article dealing with how the function-operation distinction in the Tractatus is addressing Russell's rather than Frege's issues... the others deal mostly with the later Wittgenstein.. ... Read more

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Innacurate basis for Psychologism, and Bad Info. on Frege
The author conceives philosophy in a Wittgensteinian way, that logic and mathematics are like the rules of the "game of chess" of Philosophy, and he wants to offer a proof that an epistemological paradigm (which is represented by Fregean Platonism) has been substituted gradually by another one (which is represented by Popper and Kuhn).

The author with or without knowing it distorts Frege's philosophy.First, he does so by misunderstanding Frege's view.Notturno thinks that Frege states that logical laws are "the laws of thought".He quotes that from Frege's "Der Gedanke".There are two problems with this.First of all, when Frege talks about "logic being the laws of thinking" (because he is refering to the psychological laws of thinking), he is refering to other people who hold this view, he is not talking about himself holding this belief.Also, by mistranslating "thinking" for "thought", the reader can easily be confused and believe Frege held that the sense of a sentence is a psychological thought, and that logic is normative in nature (pp. 22-32).

This leads us to a second problem: contrary to what the author states, Frege didn't hold logic as normative in nature.Frege distinguished in his "Basic Laws of Arithmetic" and in his "Der Gedanke" that there is a difference between laws of *being* true, and laws *being held* as true.Logical laws deal only with the laws of being true (I'm practically quoting Frege from his essay "Der Gedanke").For Frege the objective order of third realm entities is the justification for the normative side of logic. This mistake made by Notturno permeates the entire book.

There is another confusion about Frege.He, along with other authors like Hans Sluga and company, holds that Frege was a logicist because of epistemological considerations.This is not true, his main focus was in philosophy of mathematics, his whole program was to establish logic being the basis for arithmetic.His dealings with the notions of function, concept, object, sense and reference, are precisely defined so that they serve as the theoretical basis for his whole logicist enterprise.

Obviously, with these confusions, in Notturno's book, Frege's notion of logic is not that different of some varieties of psychologism, and in the end he would "prove" the paradigm shift.For him Frege, along with Popper, would fail in his anti-psychologism.But in reality, all he does in his book is prove the existence of two paradigms, nothing more.He can't prove that the platonistic paradigm has been overcome by psychologism, because even in Frege's time psychologism was very popular...and then today, many of the best philosophers of mathematics are platonists.I even miss Husserl's comments of his "Prolegomena of Pure Logic" which should make all of the Platonistic notions in the Platonist paradigm clearer.This might have prevented Notturno from taking Platonism as a weaker form of psychologism and would have distinguished between theoretical logic (laws of what *is*) and normative logic (laws of what *ough* to be).The latter is based on the former, not the other way around.

I think also that what he states at the very end of his book is ridicolous:that philosophy exists not to take things seriously but to "have fun" (p. 233).

Finally, Notturno apparently refers to God as a third realm object, characteristic of the former paradigm (pp. 3, 21), and that through philosophy he learned that God doesn't exist (p. ix).If through this book he wanted to prove the non-existence of God, he wasted his time.For Platonists, like Frege, logical and mathematical laws don't depend on God's existence.

For a more complete critique of his book.The reader is invited to see my comments on it on my site:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Bridge/5475/Philosophy/Notturno.htm ... Read more

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The nature of the information content of declarative sentences is a central topic in the philosophy of language. The natural view that a sentence like "John loves Mary" contains information in which two individuals occur as constituents is termed the naive theory, and is one that has been abandoned by most contemporary scholars. This theory was refuted originally by philosopher Gottlob Frege. His argument that the naive theory did not work is termed Frege's puzzle, and his rival account of information content is termed the orthodox theory.

In this detailed study, Nathan Salmon defends a version of the naive theory and presents a proposal for its extension that provides a better picture of information content than the orthodox theory gives. He argues that a great deal of what has generally been taken for granted in the philosophy of language over the past few decades is either mistaken or unsupported, and consequently, much current research is focused on the wrong set of questions.

Salmon dissolves Frege's puzzle as it is usually formulated and demonstrates how it can be reconstructed and strengthened to yield a more powerful objection to the naive theory. He then defends the naive theory against the new Frege puzzle by presenting an idea that yields both a surprisingly rich and powerful extension of the naive theory and a better picture of information content than that of the original orthodox theory.

Nathan Salmon is Professor of Philosophy, University of California at Santa Barbara. A Bradford Book. ... Read more

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