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Taking Frege at his Word

Online ISBN:
9780191897832
Print ISBN:
9780198865476
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
Book

Taking Frege at his Word

Joan Weiner
Joan Weiner
Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, Indiana University
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Published online:
17 December 2020
Published in print:
10 December 2020
Online ISBN:
9780191897832
Print ISBN:
9780198865476
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Frege is widely regarded as having set much of the agenda of contemporary analytic philosophy. As standardly read, he meant to introduce—and make crucial contributions to—the project of giving an account of the workings of (an improved version of) natural language. Yet, despite the great admiration most contemporary philosophers feel for Frege, it is widely believed that he committed a large number of serious, and inexplicable, blunders. For, if Frege really meant to be constructing a theory of the workings of (some version of) natural language, then a significant number of his stated views—including views that he claimed to be central to his philosophical picture—are straightforwardly wrong. But did Frege mean to be giving an account of the workings of language? Frege himself never actually claimed to be doing this. Taking Frege at his Word offers an interpretation that is based on a different approach to his writings. Rather than using the contributions he is taken to have made to contemporary work in the philosophy of language to infer what his projects were, Taking Frege at his Word gives priority to Frege’s own accounts of what he means to be doing. The upshot is a very different view of Frege’s project. One might suspect that Frege’s writings would have purely antiquarian interest. But this would be a mistake. The final two chapters show that Frege offers us new ways of addressing some of the philosophical problems that worry us today.

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