What could be the Great Debt to Frege? or Gottlobius ab paene omni naevo vindicatus
Abstract
In this paper I examine a number of interpretations of Wittgenstein’s criticisms of Frege’s conception of logic. One is based on Frege’s rejection of psychologism and alleges that this rejection engenders a tension that is resolved in the Tractatus. Another is based on the claim that there are patterns of inference involving what are now known as propositional attitude ascriptions that Frege’s conception of logic is allegedly not equipped to handle. Five others invoke difficulties supposed to arise from Frege’s view of thoughts as senses of names of the two truth-values. I show that none of these interpretations present a compelling criticism of Frege. I then suggest that Wittgenstein inherited from Frege an insight underlying Frege’s claim that every thought has an “opposite,” such that to reject the thought as false is to affirm the opposite as true. Frege’s insight, however, is in tension with Frege’s conception of thoughts as representing the falling of objects under concepts and his conception of negation as (expressing) a truth-function. The resolution of this tension ini the Tractatus involves (a) its Grundgedanke that neither negation nor any other “logical constant” is a representative in our picturing of the world, and (b) a fundamentally modal conception of the picturing of propositions as requiring a primitive conception of possibility.
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