[(Frege - Philosophy of Language 2e (Paper)(OBE))] [Author: M Dummett] published on

by Michael Dummett

No one has figured more prominently in the study of German philosopher Gottlob Frege than Michael Dummett. This highly acclaimed book is a major contribution to the philosophy of language as well as a systematic interpretation of Frege, indisputably the father of analytic philosophy. Philosophy of Language remains indispensable for an understanding of contemporary philosophy. Harvard University Press is pleased to reissue this classic book in paperback.

Genres: Philosophy, Language, Linguistics, Nonfiction, Logic, Empiricism

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1973

About the author

A skilled analytic mind and an ardent voice against racism, Sir Michael A. E. Dummett is considered by many to be one of twentieth-century Britain’s most influential philosophers of language. Dummett is best known for his work in the history of analytic philosophy and in his contributions to the philosophy of language and mathematics. Much of his work has taken the form of commentary on the likes of Frege, Wittgenstein, and Quine. Dummett, who considered himself a Wittgensteinian, is widely held as the English authority on the work of German logician Gottlob Frege. Though Dummett diverges from Frege, who is a realist, most of Dummett’s achievements have been pursued in connection with his enthusiasm for Frege’s thought.

Dummett was born in London in 1925 and attended prestigious boys’ schools in Wiltshire and Hampshire. Though he rejected religious belief in his youth, Dummett converted to Catholicism while serving in the armed forces during the Second World War. After his military service he went to Oxford University where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics at Christ Church College. He graduated in 1950 with first class honors and was awarded a fellowship at All Souls College. Throughout his acclaimed career Dummett remained associated with Oxford, though he has held visiting posts at several universities around the world. In 1962 he was appointed reader in the philosophy of mathematics at Oxford; in 1979 he was elected Wykeham Professor of Logic, where he served as chair until his retirement in 1992. Dummett, along with his wife, has remained active in antiracist campaigns and political reforms, even placing his philosophical career on hold for several years during the sixties to pursue these causes. He received a knighthood in 1999.

Many of Britain’s leading analytic philosophers have been significantly influenced by Dummett, including Crispin Wright, Simon Blackburn, John McDowell, and Timothy Williamson — though none would be properly classed a disciple. Dummett’s most notable contributions have come in his analysis of theories of meaning accounting for communication, reason, and representation in language. His commitment to a kind of anti-realism in debates about reference and language, though often overstated, has been a point of particular interest for his admirers and detractors alike. Dummett was not satisfied with the pessimism of Wittgenstein and the holists who denied the possibility of finally understanding a language from within language. Dummett argues that an alternative can be found if one denies the principle of bivalence. Bivalence is the notion that every meaningful proposition is either true or false; and in Dummett’s view the denial of bivalence entails anti-realism about the reference of language.

Dummett’s most influential writings are the first and second editions of Frege: Philosophy of Language (1973–1981), The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy (1981), and the 'William James Lectures' that he delivered at Harvard in 1976 published in 1991 as The Logical Basis of Metaphysics. He also delivered a series of lectures at Bologna in 1987, published in 1988 as Origins of Analytical Philosophy. In 1991 he published a collections of papers on Frege; and in 1993 a collection entitled The Seas of Language.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

This took me a really bloody long time to get through.

It's amazing. It's obviously one of the most important philosophy books of the twentieth century. This isn't just some hold your hand secondary text, this is Michael Dummett going through every detail of the philosophy of language and leaving no stone unturned. This book has really helped me with a great deal of topics that I have found are often taken for granted in philosophy education, absolutely everything is explained.

It's thoroughness is clearly this books greatest asset, it is however it's greatest downfall, and times it does get a little tedious trawling through every minute detail of every topic in the philosophy of language. There was even a point where I thought I didn't want to read this book anymore, but I'm really glad I persisted. There is also a fair amount of superfluous material in this book, and a bit much repetition. Dummett claims to have desperately tried to find ways of making the book shorter and not being able to. The man was clearly a bit mental.

One minor criticism is the way in which Dummett spends so much time trying to apply Frege's ideas to natural language. This is something that Frege never wanted to do, and something that I think is a waste of time. It is however a fairly standard thing to try and apply Frege's ideas to natural languages and so is in a sense a valid subject to treat for that reason alone.

It is well written and usually very clear, this does however make it seem more of a shame that there are some sections that are really very difficult and not clear at all.

This is not just a great guide to the philosophy of Frege, it is more or less a manual for the whole of philosophy of language.

[Zo · Rating 4 out of 5]

An immense project, with substantive discussion of an enormous range of philosophical topics. It took me about a month to get through, and I think I went through it far too fast. For all his argumentative rigor, Dummett is not very clear in the way he presents his conclusions, nor does he do a good job of "signposting" his arguments in order to give a sense of how things fit together. Given my relative unfamiliarity with many of the topics he delves into, this left me feeling confused and unsure at many points along the way here. The fault is mostly mine and I'm sure I would think differently if I had greater background in the issues, but I still think Dummett could've done a better job articulating what his actual positions are. That being said, I still feel like I learned loads from this book. It did a great job of presenting what a Fregean model of language consists in, understanding Frege's place in the history of analytic philosophy, and seeing how various issues in philosophical logic can be discussed within the context of Frege's theories. Frege's sense/reference distinctions and concept/object distinctions can seem "simple" at first, but really pounding them into your head, understanding what they consist in, and trying to get a sense of their merits versus other conceptions of language is really difficult, at least for me, so this was very helpful for my thinking on the topic. There were many points along the way where I found myself entangled in usual skeptical concerns -- whether or not the questions analytic philosophy asks are actually meaningful or answerable and how to think about pluralism when it comes to "theories of meaning." This book didn't resolve those questions for me. I leave it with the sense that Frege's conception of language is one of the best and most systematic attempts at a theory of meaning, but I am still not convinced that operating strictly within his playing field, as Dummett would, is better than grasping some of his insights but still maintaining more of a deflationary and social perspective a la Wittgenstein or Brandom. Lots more could be said here about every individual chapter and topic Dummett raises -- many-valued logics, mathematical intuitionism, quantification over everything, the status of numbers/colors, how force and sense can be seen as semantic rather than psychological, and the sense of analytic statements were some of my favorites -- but doing so would take far too much time. Going through all of these issues back to back gave me a good sense of how things relate and the implications of Frege's work, while leaving me very unsure about all the specific issues. I am mostly left unsure how much I want to continue exploring these topics, because I recognize how much time and work is needed for me to make progress on understanding them, and how that takes away from my ability to learn other things!

[Alina · Rating 5 out of 5]

At first, this was a slog to read through. Dummett’s paragraphs usually approach a page long, and at first glance his writing looks repetitive, and it’s hard to find the key points. Moreover, isn’t this just a history of philosophy book—why put in the effort to read a secondary source like this? I was wrong. Dummett brings out the foundational moves of Frege’s theory of meaning that are difficult to ascertain in reading the primary sources (at least for me.) He contrasts these moves with those of Kripke, Quine, Wittgenstein, and Russell. This makes for a discussion of fundamental issues in philosophy of language, which pertain to its implications on epistemology and metaphysics.

I’m afraid I won’t be able to do justice to much of this books. I’ll need to reread key chapters, and there’s a lot going on in the 800 pages. Let me try to summarize certain chapters.

In chapter 1 - 3 (“Sense and Tone,” “ Quantifiers” and “The Hierarchy of Levels”) Dummett addresses the basic terms of Frege’s theory, and also contextualizes his project under his background motivations. Frege wanted to find a method of proof that could guarantee the truth of mathematical statements. This requires having a way to substitute in for any such statement a formal, symbolic statement; and to do that, we must develop a compositional semantics—that is, a formal language that can explain not only which real-life sentences are well-formed, but also how the meanings of these sentences are determined on the basis of its internal structure. That is, this formal language must not only be syntactically adequate, but also semantically so.

Some thinkers, like Quine, think that Frege’s major intervention was to show that the basic unit of meaning is not the word but the sentence. Dummett thinks rather Frege’s intervention was to show why this obvious fact is true—in particular, by offering a theory of what words semantically contribute, and how truth values relate to meaning and different linguistic expressions.

According to Dummett, another major intervention of Frege’s was to offer, for the first time in Western history, a predicate logic that is mostly preserved in contemporary predicate logic. Frege had the unique insights that sentences, from the perspective of logic, are constructed in stages. For example, compare “2+3x6” and “(2+3)x6.” The second statement specifies that to compute the value of the sentence, there are two stages: first, compute what’s within the parentheses, and second compute the result of that in light of the rest of the statement.

An upshot of this shift in thinking about semantics is that we can have a minimalist theory that foregrounds, in effect, just three logical operation—which concern linking an expression with truth conditions. We have: (1) applying sentential operators to sentences in order to form new sentences, (2) omitting an occurrence of a proper name from a sentence in order to form a one-place predicate, and (3) applying a quantifier to a one-place predicate to form a sentence. These operations can then get re-applied at different stages for a given sentence, and also at different levels/orders; through this means, be capable of accommodating the diversity and complexity of linguistic expressions.

Let’s see how this works with an example. (Forgive me for mistakes and for using un-idiomatic vocabulary; I’m not familiar with talking about semantics in these ways.) Take the sentence “Bessie loves Mark.” Frege analyzes any multi-place function such that it can be broken down into stages of application of a one-place function. When it is a two-place function, as it is with this sentence, it will amount to a one-place function whose value is another one-place function. The first step is to introduce a “sign of generality” into this sentence by omitting the proper name. We get “ξ loves Mark.” This can be made into a one-place predicate, F(ξ), where F amounts to loving Mark. Then, the initial sentence can be manipulated into “Bessie loves ζ.” The one-place predicate G(ζ) would then yield that whatever is slotted into the argument space would be loved by Bessie.

So, there should be a step-wise application of filling in one argument place at a time, and at each time, we get a one-place function. First, saturate the one place with the object Bessie, and we get F(ξ) (i.e., Bessie loves someone.) Then, saturate the argument place of this predicate with Mark and we get the initial sentence. The procedure could also be done with starting off with saturating the function with Mark, and that’d take us to G(ζ) and the same outcome.

Restricting the available operations to the above three, and maintaining that there is this step-wise process, is crucial for having a reasonable ontology. It permits us to think that the only things that exist in the world are objects. Thus, the existence of two-place predicates doesn't indicate that relations are special entities in the world; rather, they are just a special function, which outputs a one-place function.

Before Frege, ancient and medieval logicians lacked this understanding of the possibility of a step-wise procedure of application of such simple operations. They’d think that “Bessie loves Mark” would have to involve the predication of one object. This has the net effect of obscuring the logical structure of sentences. With a simple picture of the predication of an object for any sentence, distinctions cannot be made about whether or how many other objects are involved; i.e., quantification is lost. For example, the scholastic way of understanding the logical structure of this sentence would be neutral with regards to whether it is Bessie who loves a particular person, somebody, or all people. (There are other differences between these paradigms of logic. I wish I could understand them, but I cannot at this time. I know at least it involves differences in metaphysical outlooks. Scholastic logicians would think that there are objects that correspond with either object or predicate terms, and so populate an ontology with many universals, for every predicate term. In contrast, as mentioned above, Frege shows that predicate terms are just functions that are not yet saturated and welcome in objects to be applied to. This reduces such metaphysical weirdness.)

Quantifiers are then, by the lights of contemporary logic as established by Frege, second-level functions, which take in a first-level function. For example, “∀x(Fx)” takes in (Fx) which is a first-level function. This comes apart from the logic that predates Frege, where the scholastic tradition would take quantifier terms (e.g., some, all) as first-level terms like all others. They didn’t have a distinction between levels of functions.

Keeping apart different levels of functions is crucial. It avoids category mistakes such as mixing objects with concepts, or concepts with second-level concepts, as deserving the same logical analysis.

A nice methodological point of Frege’s that Dummett stresses is that Frege was sensitive to the opacity and flawed character of natural language. But this did not lead him to give up on thinking that there could be a logical nature obscured by the particularities of natural language, or to give up on such language as our major conduit for arriving at truth. Frege was instead driven to find the underlying semantic and syntactical features of language, and he succeeded to at least a significant extent.

In chapters 4-6 (“Proper Names,” “Sense and Reference,” and “Some Theses of Frege’s on Sense and Reference”) Dummett does a deep-dive into explaining these basic components of Frege’s theory. Proper names are foundational for any semantical theory; only they carry the promise of picking out objects in the world, and so they are critical to establishing the link between language and truth. Dummett spends some time addressing criticisms of Frege’s view of proper names. There’s Ramsey’s argument for that it is futile to give formal criteria for distinguishing proper names from other purported types of linguistic expression. The key to refuting Ramsey is to see that objects lack contraries, while statements have contraries. The contrary of “Mark is wonderful” is “It’s not the case that Mark is wonderful”; but Mark himself lacks any contrary. While a predicate on its own like “wonderful” does not yet have a truth value, it still has a contrary; there is another predicate with is true of just those objects of which the initial predicates is false, and false just of those objects of which the initial predicate is true. The formal criteria for distinguishing proper names from predicates and other expressions can center on this hard difference; proper names, like objects themselves, lack contraries.

Frege’s distinction between sense and reference is the bedrock of understanding the relation between truth, meaning, and language. The sense of a linguistic expression is the aspect of its meaning that uniquely contributes to the determination of the truth value of the sentence in which that expression figures. Reference, in contrast, is not an aspect of meaning at all; rather, referents are the objects, properties, events, etc. picked out by our expressions and that serve as their truth conditions, that is, the conditions under which our expressions are either true or false.

Besides sense, Frege maintains a few other terms that pick out other aspects of meaning—but aspects that are irrelevant to determining the referent of an expression and thus its potential truth value (its actual truth value of its a referring sentence, and its potential truth value of its a sub-sentential expression or a non-referring sentence.) Frege characterizes “tone” in terms of lighting and coloring; examples of this are the mental associations we make in reading poetry, which allow lines of poetry to be intelligible and to strike us, but that have nothing to do with truth and falsity. Dummett criticizes Frege for claiming that tone requires mental associations to mental images; such images are private and so cannot be an aspect of meaning at all, which is necessarily communicable and “stable.” Dummett’s proposed alternative is that the difference between sense and tone is that getting a tone wrong will be a matter of having mistakes in one’s history of personal associations between expressions and meaning, while getting a sense wrong requires that one has had a mistake in what the expression was intended to convey.

To elaborate on reference: Frege bases this notion upon the narrow notion of the interpretation of formulae of a formal or logical language with respect to a domain. For example, a unary (one-place) function, which figures in a formula, will be assigned to a property. So, each term of the predicate logic will have some object as its denotation, where “object” here denotes an item in the set specified by the domain (e.g., which can be a relation, a property, etc.) (I’m not used to talking about these matters so I’m probably using non-idiomatic language here.) In other words, denotation, as associated with the interpretation of formulae of predicate logic, is the basis for understanding reference for Frege. This is an important point. It is the starting point for understanding why it is not crazy, and rather even common sense, to think that predicates have reference according to Frege. We need to distance ourselves from the intuitive picture that reference according to which the relation between a proper name and an object in the world is the basic case of reference. (Also a useful terminological note that Dummett offers is that we can use “reference” to talk about the relation between expression and thing, or the fact that the expression stands in for the thing; and then we can use “referent” to talk about the thing itself.)

While reference is sufficient for understanding which formal sentences are true or false, it is insufficient for understanding how natural language works—that is, for understanding meaning and how meaningful sentences can be true or false. Sense is key here. The morning star and the evening star share a referent, and yet they have different meanings for people who lacked this knowledge. Whenever the meaning of an expression is related to truth value, it consists in a sense, and in turn, that sense is based in the way by which we practically pick out the corresponding referent.

This leads to a problem for Frege. It is difficult to distinguish between the sense of a proper name and the general information we possess about its referent. Belief that this difficulty can’t be overcome has led thinkers to m maintain that proper names aren’t part of natural language, or that which fixes their referent isn’t part of meaning (cf. Mill and Russell; also Kripke.) In other words, the problem is there’s no one favored way of practically determining the referent of an expression; the ways we take for doing this can change over time and between individuals. Dummett’s response is to return to the fact that sense is necessarily linked to truth. Only the ways of determining the referent, or the components of the general information we possess about it, which are reliable (i.e., that can lead to the formation of true sentences) are part of sense.

Dummett also has a lengthy discussion, presenting his argument against Kripke’s claim that rigid designators are significantly distinct from definite descriptions, such that it would be wrong to think that both consist in sense when used by us in natural language. A lot of this went over my head, but I sense that this is a very important discussion.

I’m running out of room. The other chapters of the book don’t address the foundations of Frege’s theory of semantics, but rather address aspects of our practical use of language and focus on criticism of Frege. Let me try to talk about what I understand so far regarding these foundational issues of philosophy of language that Dummett addresses through analyzing Frege. (This is gonna be highly preliminary.) There is a striking upshot of having sense be part of the meaning of any linguistic expression whatsoever, including that of proper names. In effect, this commits Frege to that whenever we know the world—that is, whenever we make a claim about something, or cognize something in a meaningful way that can be given propositional content even if it doesn't involve language—it must be structured by our personal activities and how we lead our lives. Sense is based in how we come to know and interact with the world; so in a metaphoric sense, we’re always screened off from knowing something “directly,” that is, in a way that is not ultimately mediated by what we know as based in our human activities. In contrast, thinkers like Mill, Russell, and Kripke maintain that sometimes we just directly know parts of the world, i.e., the objects for which we use proper names to know them, if not also other aspects of the world.

This divide is interesting. My preliminary inclination is to think that we can just directly know the world when it is concrete objects that we can perceive via perceptual mechanisms that are under consideration. In contrast, any part of the world that cannot fit that description will be mediated by sense. So, whenever we talk and use proper names, we can think about what we’ve said under either heading: first, as picking out that object via our memory of what we’ve perceived, and second, as picking out that object qua something that is appreciated for its role in culture, and thus involves more than perceptual mechanisms to appreciate. The first manner by which we can interpret a referring expression will involve direct knowledge, free of Fregean sense.

Moreover, I’m very curious about the exact relation between sense and reference. Dummett uses the phrase that sense uniquely contributes to the determination of the referent of an expression. But I wonder what else can be said about this (Dummett likely said more but I haven’t registered these points yet.) Maybe the distinction between sense and tone can only be maintained in theory, but in practice, they are entwined in strange ways. My pet hypothesis for some time now has been that in order to get at truth-evaluable statements, sometimes we must start off with our sensing the significance of some part of reality in such a way that this significance itself lacks the capacity to figure into a proposition and so is disconnected from truth through that means. But it would be necessarily tied up with reality, which has its own complicated but necessary relations to truth. This seems to be at odds with Frege’s theory, which maintains that sense itself is the basic unit of truth value, when we’re talking about the sense of an overall sentence, i.e., thought. On my picture, it wouldn’t be sense that can intrinsically have a truth-value; it would be the propositions that we use to express a sense (i.e., thought) that do. If this is on the right track, I’d need to understand further what a proposition amounts to, if not thought, such that it can be truth evaluable…

Let me offer a last note. I was given advice on how to read Dummett. Don’t be intimated by his massive paragraphs and apparent redundancy. Rather, think of his thought as unfolding in “spirals”; he starts with an idea, then goes into various details, to then return to that idea with a deepened perspective upon it. Moreover, think of each paragraph as expressing a single thought; unlike many writers who chunk their writing such that different thoughts that are related to one another constitute a paragraph, Dummett devotes paragraphs to individual thoughts.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

A MASTERFUL SUMMARY OF ONE SIDE OF FREGE'S WORK

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) was a German mathematician, logician and philosopher, who was one of the founders of modern logical theory. Giuseppe Peano and Bertrand Russell introduced his work to later generations of logicians and philosophers.

Michael Dummett teaches Logic at Oxford; he has written books such as "The Interpretation of Frege's Philosophy," "Truth and Other Enigmas," "The Logical Basis of Metaphysics," etc.

He wrote in the Preface of this 1973 book, "This book is the first volume of two about Frege: it deals with his philosophy of language, and the second will treat of his philosophy of mathematics... I have left until the second volume a full consideration of Frege's definition of analyticity... I have said comparatively little here about Frege's doctrine of classes..."

But he admits at the end of the Preface, "There is some irony for me in the fact that the man about whose philosophical views I have devoted, over years, a great deal of time to thinking, was, at least at the end of his life, a virulent racist, specifically an anti-semite. This fact is revealed by a fragment of a diary which survives ... The diary shows Frege have been a man of extreme right-wing political opinions, bitterly opposed to the parliamentary system, democrats, liberals, Catholics, the French and, above all, Jews, who he thought ought to be deprived of all political rights and, preferably, expelled from Germany. When I first read that diary... I was deeply shocked, because I had revered Frege as an absolutely rational man, if, perhaps, not a very likeable one..."

He states, "When Frege engages in polemic against psychologism, what he is concerned to repudiate is the invasion of the theory of meaning by notions concerned with mental processes, mental images, and the like, and the confusion between the process by which we come to acquire a grasp of sense and what constitutes such a grasp. The psychological was for him a realm of incommunicable inner experience: cognitive notions... do not belong to the domain of the psychological as thus understood." (Pg. 240)

He points out, "Frege has three principal theses about the notions of truth and falsity. These are: (1) that to which truth and falsity are primarily ascribed in a thought; (2) truth and falsity are related to sentences as their referents; and (3) truth is indefinable." (Pg. 364)

He argues, "We have seen that... Frege's belief in the existence of non-linguistic correlates of incomplete expressions---concepts, relations and functions---can be justified, but that... the semantic role of such expressions cannot be explained in terms of their referents in anything like the same way as can the semantic role of proper names. The palpable incorrectness of Frege's deductions from his general principles concerning sentences may serve to deter even the most dogmatic disciple of Frege from overrating the analogy between the reference of names and that of incomplete expressions." (Pg. 428)

He observes, "Frege was very well aware of the fundamental methodological role played by these principles: indeed, in the Preface to [the Basic Laws of Arithmetic] he lists as the three basic principles that he has followed: always to separate sharply the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective; to ask after the meaning of words only in the context of sentences, not in isolation; and to keep in view the distinction between concept and object." (Pg. 631)

He notes, "Frege's ideas appear to have no ancestry. He applied himself to formal logic, and invented a totally new approach; he applied himself to philosophy, and wrote as if the world was young and the subject had only just been invented. It is true that his works are full of diatribes against the mistakes of others: but he never seems to have learned from anybody else, not even by reaction; other authors appear in his writings only as object-lessons in how not to handle the subject." (Pg. 661)

He suggests, "it is probably due to Wittgenstein that Frege is read by philosophers today. The Tractatus [Logico-Philosophicus] pays profound homage to Frege, homage that is pointedly more intense than that paid to Russell, and is crammed with references to his doctrines: indeed, the book is virtually unintelligible without an understanding of its Fregean background. If it had not been for the influence of this celebrated book, and of Wittgenstein's other teaching and writing, it is possible that the writings of Frege might have been utterly forgotten." (Pg. 662)

He acknowledges, "The few fragmentary writings of Frege's final period are not of high quality: they are interesting chiefly as showing that Frege did... acknowledge the failure of the logicist programme, which he had announced so confidently in [Basic Laws], and had the energy to begin to construct an alternative whole theory of the foundations of mathematics to replace it. The discovery of Russell's paradox had been a shattering blow to a man who had repeatedly had to face the discouragement of neglect when he knew that his work was of the highest value... What is surprising is not that it silenced him for fifteen years, but that he ever started to write again." (Pg. 664)

This is a highly-detailed study of Frege's philosophy, that will be "must reading" for anyone seriously studying Frege.