1. Frege: "Thought, Sense, & Reference"

hello and welcome this is contemporary philosophy and I'm mark Thor's be in the next 15 videos or so we're gonna be taking a look at is a brief sketch of the basic framework that I think would be helpful for students to understand contemporary philosophy now we talk about contemporary philosophy there's many different things we could talk about because there's so many philosophers today who are writing really great excellent work many of them I know and many of them might don't know so there's really a whole ocean of people we could be talking about a contemporary philosophy what I've chosen to do in this video series is really introduce you to two of the key let's put the two of the most important trains of philosophical thought that occur within the 20th century roughly look at some of the central figures with any analytic philosophy and then some of the central figures within continental philosophy in particular we're gonna begin by looking at Freya who is a mathematician and who ultimately is also the father of first-order quantificational logic but he also was really essential in terms of introducing the the analysis of language that we see come forward in and the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein who's probably the most important thinker of the toy of the 20th century at least that's my view I don't know if that's really true or not but you know everyone has to stake a claim somewhere and I think Vicens town is very important because he represents a really a turning point in modern philosophy through an analysis of language and all that begins with Fraga in fact that's we're gonna be taking a look at in this video today but another train of thought we're gonna take a look guy begins with Edmund Husserl and we'll start looking at his work next week and in whose role is the father of phenomenology but like Fraga he was a mathematician and he was ultimately interested in articulating a defense of logic that's actually in many ways very sympathetic or comparable to the work of Fraga but whose roles were was very important because it set the stage for what the work of Martin Heidegger who was a famous existentialist and who really centralizes the classic philosophical problem philosophical problem around the problem of being so we're gonna look a lot of heidegger's work as well and then after that there's so many other things we're gonna take a look at but one of the the thinkers that I'm excited to look at is going to be Sean Paul Gerard in his book simulations who I sort of see him as the as a sort of a signpost for what the postmodern might be so that's what we're going to take a look at in this course we're gonna really begin at the beginning of contemporary philosophy by looking at the work of the fray guy in the late 19th century and early 20th century and then next week we'll look at who's role in the early part of the 20th century then we're gonna take a look at big Constanta Heidegger then we're gonna look at some a couple other thinkers after them ending with the work of Jean Paul Gerard so hopefully this will be valuable and hopefully this will be helpful so let's go ahead and begin our discussion on Fraga now so welcome back everyone got lobbed Fraga now he I sort of put him here he is very important in terms of the philosophy of mathematics the philosophy of mind and logic so it's very very important he's interested he actually was a mathematician and niche initially but ultimately his work extends to almost all of the domains of philosophical work that we see so number one he was the inventor of modern quantificational logic if you wanna if you're not familiar with quantificational logic you can get a brief introduction by taking a look at my playlist on the introduction of formal logic looking in section 8 and later which is not a full-fledged analysis of quantificational logic but it is a general introduction you can take a look at in fact you can also take a look at I have another video in which I discussed the way it they the way in which frege's work holds really is can be understood as a response within the history of the development of logic so Frank is very very important with regard to that he's also a famous proponent of logical ISM logical ism is the idea that mathematical truths are ultimately at root logical truths so there's a great debate within the history within the late 19th century and within the history of mathematics and the philosophy of mathematics which is namely this which is is mathematics our mathematics in logic doing the same thing right so in mathematics we have quantities and we articulate patterns of relationship between quantities as well as functions of relations for quantities and there's and that's probably a not a very precise definition at all for mathematics but mathematics is essentially looking at these formal features and relationships within various quantities now in logic which is the analysis of argumentation in ultimately the analysis of how we can articulate true arguments well with there's a question which is well is the mathematician and is the logician ultimately doing the same thing keep in mind here that if we're looking within the grand art of the history of philosophy one of the things we'll notice is that there's been a long discussion going all the way back to Plato regarding the relationship between philosophy and mathematics so frege's view ultimately is that mathematics is based upon logic so this is known as logical ism in fact his most important work articulated a script and in a mechanism for understanding logical relations and being able to formalize them in but their subject in their predicate variations and then ultimately to use that as a way to articulate the basic definition for mathematical concepts there's other people who fall within the camp of logical ISM probably those famously is gonna be Bertrand Russell as well as whitehead in his and their famous principia mathematica so well one of the other things is that will see that frege's a critic of a psychologism and we're gonna define that a little bit but what we can say is that psychologism is the view that ultimately the laws of mathematics and the laws of logic are ultimately derivative of psychological laws or psychological structures so he's a critic of that view and he's also a critic of the view of formalism which is namely that of mathematical formalism I won't go into it cuz knitting until I talk about it but you can take a look at that go to the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy and you can learn more about that um he's also Franco was also highly influential in terms of the development of analytic philosophy as I mentioned earlier some of the major figures within that camp would be Bertrand Russell Rudolf Carnap and of course little bacon Stein but today there's many many other analytic thinkers or thinkers within analytic philosophy and I think many of them today would see maybe what we could say is that Frigga introduces what might be called as the the classic form of analytic philosophy but ultimately develops further into today's era a little bit about the biography and some of his key works now I put a little picture here his most important book is probably the bigger shrift were the concept script and we'll talk about that at some point here but Franco was born in 1848 roughly the mid 19th century and he died in roughly the first third of the 20th century in 1925 no Fraggle was a German he was actually bored of Bismarck Germany I mean his parents at when he was a kid his parents both ran a private girls school I believe both his mother and his father served as principal of that school at some point um so he was you know it's a and he was also Lutheran in terms of his sort of religious man he's very conservative in his own political views but he entered university in 1869 at the University of Vienna but only two or three short years later he transferred to the University of göttingen in 1871 in 1873 his dissertation for which he received his PhD was on a geometrical representation of imaginary figures in a plane so he's through and through a mathematician and his PhD is in mathematics not philosophy notably but his most important contributions of course occur both mathematics but I would say principally logic in 1879 he published the concept scripture there big rift rift which effectively articulated a mechanism for doing something that no one had been able to do since well no one has ever been able to do until Franco was able to do that and that is to figure out a way to create a formalized script or a formalized system by which you could articulate the logical relations not just between propositions which liveness has actually done some work in that and not in not just it in not just in just in terms of categorical relationships such as the categorical logic and Aristotle but notably what fragant does does he combines both so he creates a script that essentially brings together propositional logic as well as categorical logic so it's a pretty remarkable thing we're not gonna really talk about it what that system looks like in this video I will say it's very very interesting and brilliant but it's also difficult to understand potentially but it's definitely worth taking a look at in 1884 he published the foundations of arithmetic which set out to articulate precisely his view of logical ISM as we mentioned before some of the other key works he some of the key papers and things that he wrote include his essay function and concept sense in reference on concept of object as well as I think believe there's a the basic laws of arithmetic which combine a number of different things together we're gonna see today we're gonna look at sense and reference but we're also going to take a look at in our video today a real close reading of frege's essay on thought and what it is thinking is so it's very interesting one thing I should say is that by 1902 Bertrand Russell actually proved that there was a contradiction within frege's system it was quite sad because what it ultimately meant is that because of Russell's paradox Fraga was forced to recognize that his entire mcgriff shrift and as well as his work in the foundations of arithmetic had been invalidated and unfortunately he was never really able to come back and you know be able to prove or he was never able to come back and prove logical ISM as was his goal so it's kind of sad actually I mean 8 1918 Frager retired and then by 1925 he died there has been a just mentioned over here is that there has been quite a bit of ethical criticism against Fraga despite frege's mathematical genius and obviously his importance in terms of the history of logic Frigga was also very anti-semitic and very socially conservative for his day and so for instance he advocated a number of things which were highly anti-semitic and ultimately sadly seemed to be indicative of what will come just ten years after his death which is the Holocaust so there isn't some ethical criticism worth thinking about with regard to frege's biography we're not gonna take a look at that that in this video and that's because we're really just interested in terms of his philosophy regarding logic so but that is worth mentioning and it's really too bad to be honest so let's start off with some background in some context right and this sense gives you a sense of the way in which I am understanding and the way I'm gonna present contemporary philosophy contemporary philosophy is like all philosophy is really an investigation into meaning and what does it mean for things to have meaning right and we're gonna see is that for instance or whatever we talk about things have a meaning we articulate them in terms of language that is we articulate our ideas in terms of propositions which this seems to mean that meaning is itself a problem with regards to language so this is the way I which I want you to see that or I want this is one potential framework by which we can understand the history of philosophy with them from the 19th century into the 20th century leading up to post-modernism ultimately I'm we're not gonna this isn't a philosophy on post-modernism but I want it to do in this in this sense of videos on contemporary philosophy they show you how a common set of problems regarding the language ultimately developed in two different traditions in analytic and content philosophy leading up towards what we might consider to be some of the characteristics of postmodern philosophy there also is what's known as post analytic philosophy as well so the way I'm seeing it as mentioned before is they looked in the analytic train we're starting with Fraga today and we're gonna sort of move our way towards Bacon's time and in continental philosophy eventually we're gonna look at who's role next week and then eventually we'll take a look at Heidegger's work now went back to Frager one the things that's worth mentioning here is the importance that another mathematician played with in the development a frege's logical system and I'm not gonna go through scuzz I already have another video on it I didn't ask this it I didn't include this in the reading but here's a picture of Georg Cantor who is that who developed what's known as today is known as set theory and he spent his life trying to develop it what is set theory well set theory is the analysis of infinity at the mathematical analysis of infinity there's a picture of a diagonal proof system I'm not gonna go through all of that today but I should say that if you're a mathematician you're studying mathematics that ultimately frege's logical work is really predicated upon the mathematical work of Georg Cantor who sadly was essentially ostracized from the mathematical community it would during his time period but ultimately his work is so important that even though he's public career while he was alive he wasn't recognized for his genius Garrett Carter is very very important and he ultimately helped build the tool set that Fraga would use in order to articulate his own quantificational logic in fact as I mentioned before those Russell's paradox my view is that ultimately Russell's paradox is derivative of the same paradox that Georg Cantor faced in his development of the Continuum Hypothesis so that's something if you're interested in you can take a look at and do further research on so like I said today's discussions on this problem with meaning here are some of the problems that we're gonna see Fraga begin to discuss and they're ultimately relevant to our discussion today one moment the first is what is truth no small question there what is a thought what does it mean to think what is an idea right what is an idea how is that different from having a thought are they the same thing or not where do these thoughts and ideas come from for instance some of our ideas seem to come from us and some of our thoughts seemed to come from others so where exactly do our thoughts come from in other words another way of asking the same question is to ask well are our thoughts and our ideas made or they discover is for instance like when you're learning for instance the Pythagorean theorem a squared plus B squared equals C squared one of the questions you could ask is what exactly are you learning are you learning something that was constructed by humans or something that was discovered about nature by humans so what exactly is the mathematician to and of course what is the logician and the philosopher doing it's a very very important question now another question here is why is it that we can say the same thing in different ways this is another sort of interesting problem and of course related to that we'll see is the question of what exactly is the sense of a word you'll frequently will see in vacant stein you freak talk about nonsense later in the course and frequently hear people talk about the sensing whether or not something in sense makes sense right well what is sense so that's gonna be one of the things we're gonna see Frigga address now we're gonna start off in you're gonna see that I'm gonna talk first and I spend most of my time on this essay which is which is trans as the thought a logical animal Cori if I Kotla Fraga it was published between 1918 1919 in German of the version that I'm actually gonna be using here was published in the in the journal mind from volume 65 and number 259 from 1956 and if you want you can find this essay the full text of it through JSTOR if you have that if you're if you have access to that so that's fast a we're gonna spend most of our time with ya and then we're also going to take a look at another essay I'm looking for I don't see it but which is I'm sent in reference so I'm not gonna spend as much time on that essay as I am on this one that's partially because I really like this essay it comes this essay was written fairly late in whose girl's life but it really in many ways lays down a nice beginning point to begin to understand what some of the central ideas concepts and problems are for of a philosophy of language and a philosophy that that seeks to articulate the conditions by which meaning is possible so let's sort of go through it here and you're gonna see I'm actually if you follow along the text of course I can't discuss everything oops I can't discuss every that's in the text because there's so much stuff that fragrant aux about we wouldn't have time to do so but I have tried my best to follow the text fairly closely and so if you are reading the text you will notice that I'm following through really the very structure of frege's argument without little variation or with little variation so let's start this is that logic logic is a Falak isn't is the science of argumentation or the science of truth we're gonna see is about friggin things in Franklin but Franklin has to understand what exactly does that mean because if logic is the science of truth what exactly is truth right he says for instance you can compare aesthetics of our ethics like throw us thanks twice or physics for instance so for instance physics is really interested in articulating what is nature is right in terms of material nature aesthetics is interested in articulating what the beautiful is and ethics is ultimately oriented towards the good well in the very same way that each of those sciences the science in nature the science in the beautiful of the science of action of good action that each of these sciences has an object towards which they're directed essentially a principle that organizes their that organizes all their work and for logic that is true so logic is ultimately concerned with the laws of truth so what we could say is that logic is the analysis of argument is that about the science of argumentation for making good arguments well what is a good argument a good argument is one in which if you if the premises of the argument are true then the conclusion will necessarily true follow as being true as well this is known as the validity of an argument and then of course it's not just that there's a second criteria right it's not just the truth functionality of an argument that makes it good but it's also the fact that an argument really does relate to the truth right it's that as the sound argumentation again take a look at the introduction to formal logic videos I've posted in which I explain some of these concepts but logic ultimately is concerned with the laws of truth so what exactly is a law right well there's two different ways in which we can understand a law right well the one way is to say that you have laws in which conformity is not essential it is a non-essential that is the law could exist without people obeying the law right so for instance it's illegal to steal someone else's property but strictly speaking that law can exist even if people don't follow it right that would be a good state of affairs but it would be something that's at least conceivable right the other way in which we can talk about laws when we think that we would talk for instance about laws of nature and in this sense a law is something that's concerned universally let's put this way a law in this sense is one in which there universal conformity is essential so for instance the law for the book for the conservation of energy for instance that law is a natural law in the sense that no one can break it right everyone it everyone lives and all motion is governed according to that principle so you have these two types of laws so we can ask ourselves well what kind of law is ultimately logic interested in right well for one one way in which we can begin to to answer that question is to recognize or we'll see therefore Fraga the laws of truths are not psychological so he ultimately the laws of truth are not psychological in the sense that they're not simply derived from the fact that the mind works in the way it does right he says quote the assertion both of what is false and of what is true takes place in accordance with psychological laws so you can say here is that law in this first sense would be a sort of psychologism but long this.bottom sense law in which there's universal conformity really seems to be the type of laws they of truth that logic is interested articulating that is the universal unchanging timeless laws that govern how truth functions within our statements and within our language so we see here is that we see the emergence right for the very beginning of this essay of anti psychologism and we're gonna see that anti psychologism is a theme for the early 20th century philosophers in particular the two philosophers that we're looking at here at Fraga obviously it's an important to him but also see who Cyril is equal concerned with articulated arguments against psychologism for which he was actually himself accused of doing so that's sort of important so let speak about this what does it mean to say something is true well we know that it went first if we look it up in the dictionary booth says that the word true is an adjective right an adjective is a word that describes something else right it describes a subject or it describes a noun rather or a noun phrase so that means that just say that something is true is in a way to describe something well wait a second how does truth come into the equation here as an adjective right cos C so let's start for instance someone come and say this is true picture X so here's a picture of Abraham Lincoln and what I'm gonna say is this is Abraham Lincoln and many of you will probably agree dyed your head and say that's true right so ask ourselves in this case or when we say that this is a true picture of Abraham Lincoln what is it we're saying well there's a first possibility that we're gonna see Frey get rich eggs but that first possibility is to say well this is this is a true picture of Abraham Lincoln only insofar as this is what Abraham Lincoln actually looked like so in other words we're talking about here is the idea that truth equals representation or correct representation or in other words the truth is a form of correspondence now this is actually known and this has been a theory that can be articulated at least since the time of Rene Descartes but even earlier and this is that what we might call the correspondence theory of truth right so what we can say is that this picture of Abraham Lincoln is a true picture of Abraham Lincoln only insofar as it corresponds to a being a picture of be Abraham Lincoln okay so that means there what it means seems to suggest is that truth is some sort of relation right truth is a relation between the picture and the actual thing itself in this case there being a pit there being a Abraham Lincoln right the representation of Abraham Lincoln okay so if truth is a relation of correspondents what exactly is correspondence and here's where things get messy right perfect correspondence if we were to try to figure out what it means for things to correspond perfectly then what we would say is that correspondence occurs when things coincide and are therefore not distinct from each other all right so think about two twin brothers right the two twin brothers have a correspondence in their DNA right what does that mean it means that they effectively have the same DNA or in other words they're not distinct the DNA itself the sequencing is not itself distinct between the two twins so perfect correspondence occurs with things coincide they're therefore not distinct notice for instance if I say 2+2 equals 4 or I say 5 minus 1 equals 4 there's a way in which both of those things the let's put it this solution for both of those formulas right the number 4 is identical right those two things have perfect correspondence the number 4 in the first equation the driver for the second one they're not distinct at all so that's maybe an example for instance of perfect correspondence the problem those does that work when we talk about language we talk about logic well for ultimately for Fraga no it doesn't there's a major problem he writes that truth can't be a feature of correspondence between things because things are objects right but objects can't be correspondent so for instance he gives the example of for instance if you are trying to zoom in here frigging gives the example of if you if you're buying something right so let's imagine you're you're you're gonna train in an ounce of gold and you want money so what I did is I actually went to Google I typed it in and this is today's at least as of this video the price for how much it Out's of gold is worthless right you can see that as for today an ounce of gold is worth of $1300 thirty thirteen thirty four one thousand three hundred and thirty four dollars and seventy cents so hey that's my throat's killing me today so sorry about that so you can see that that's the price of gold today so if I give you a an ounce of gold and you give me $1300 here right then we can you give me that exact now what we can say is that there's a perfect exchange between the two according to this rate which means that they correspond with each other but you can see immediately here's how exactly can an ounce of gold correspond with money in truth as being one thousand three hundred thirty four dollars and seventy cents you can see because an ounce of coal is a piece of metal and the rest of this is a check or maybe it's a pile of cash with some some coins right you can ask yourself how did those two things correspond with each other and you can see here is the truth is not an idea that corresponds to reality that doesn't mean that in truth that there isn't truth in reality but it means the truth isn't is not an idea that corresponds to reality because if it were there'd only be half truths for instance the correspondence theory of truth Frigga argues ultimately collapses because truth is not a condition about the physical world right truth is about something else right consider that when someone says something consider the case that if someone said something you replied by saying that is true what exactly is going on here well we're gonna begin to see is that is that well what we're gonna see is that it's not the sentence that's true but it's the sense of the sentence that's true right so if I tell you that Donald Trump is the current President of the United States and he is the current President of the United States you're gonna say that's true but notice here you're not saying that my sentence is true you're saying that Donald Trump being the president is what's true so it's the sense of the sentence not the sentence itself that's true right now so this is this notion of sense right well once a sentence the sense is merely a series of sounds that have a sense but what is a sense yeah or in other words is the sense of a sentence an idea this is a question we look at we're gonna see is that the truth conditions or truth is ultimately related to the sense of what we say not to the actual words we say and it's related to the world in some way okay and here's a here's a quote from fraidy says truth is not a quality that corresponds with a pratik kind of sense impression so we all have sense impressions of the world but notice that when you look at the world you'd never have a sense impression of truth or of the world being true right truth seems to come after market as it were after after our sense impressions of the world are fulfilled in our intuition and that same passage franca says that being true is not a material perceptible property nothing actually gets added to a thing when we prescribe truth to it right so for instance what I say that it's true that Donald Trump is the current President of the United States I haven't added anything to the world I haven't said anything that would give me more knowledge about Donald Trump for the presidency really all I've done by saying that that statement is true is I've done it well what have I done that's ultimately gonna be the difficulty here what we can say is that one other one here when we talk about sentences because all of our statements about the world about the truth about things we consider to be true or things we consider to know all come in the form of language and in the form of sentences so sense has always communicate and state something is the case right we're gonna see that this is ultimately what a proposition is but what we can say is that the indicative sentence always indicates something pretty straightforward that's what we call an indicative sense that sentence indicative because it indicates right so what we can do therefore when we recognize that what we're talking about our addictive senses because only indicative senses or in in the general sense only indicative senses are can be said to be true or false right and whenever you have a sends you have two components if you have the assertion which is the statements and the words you use but you almost have the content which is really what we might say is the thought of what they're talking about right so if I say a triangle has three sides notice that I can say that in many different ways that can give you a different type of assertion I can say three sides does a triangle have for instance but both of those sentences the Speight than having different types of assertions being different assertions or being different forms of statements they both have the same content and this is ultimately what he thinks I've thought is the thought is the content we have of things but I missed a finger one thing I do want to mention here is that fragment will only consider propositional sentences so he's not gonna think about questions or imperatives or other non assertive forms of language he knows that language does all of these things and not every statement and language is ultimately by subject to the bivalent property of being either true or false so when I asked you the question what's your name there is no true or false that goes along with that kind of sentence so just keep in mind here that we're only thinking about these indicative type of sentences sentences where I say that the the the grass is green or there it's raining outside these are all indicative senses they could be true or false now there's something else important since now we're talking about thought we're talking about thinking we have to recognize that whenever we talk about thinking there's really three elements to the distinction we have to be concerned with on the one hears there's the apprehension of the thought and that's what Frank calls thinking number twos there's the recognition of the truth of the thought which is the judgment and then finally there's the manifestation of this judgment which is an assertion so for instance go talk to the example I gave but if I say that Donald Trump is the curved president of the United States to understand what it is I'm suggesting is to have a thought is to think nice to have a thought to recognize that that's a true statement is to knit that make a judgement and then to manifest that judgment in a way by saying it is true that Donald Trump is the Preta current president ice hits that is to articulate an assertion so we have these sort of three levels that Frigga suggesting that we bifurcate the discussion along which is thinking judgment and assertion okay in fact down to 94 here of the mind article Frigga articulates the idea that the recognition of truth is always declared in the form of an indicative sentence right so frankenz can engage in a discussion of poetry at some point actually because he thinks poetry is kind of interesting because in poetry you have language but you don't quite have truth conditions of language even if poetry uses indicative types of senses right so you can imagine in poetry someone might say love is you know a flower growing in the Sun that's a terrible poem or whatever if someone says something like that it's an indicative type sense but it doesn't quite have the same register of truth conditions of the type of statements he's interested in and he says for just the humanities the arts these things they do discuss it engage with truth and they have true conditions but really their forms of language which arouse feeling more than they assert the truth of things so for instance if someone says thank God imagine you hear someone praying and they say thank God well we see there is that that kind of statement arouses a feeling it doesn't assert something's the case and in fact he goes on to say a to 95 quote what are called the humanities are more closely connected with poetry and are therefore less scientific than the exact sciences which are drier the more the exact they are for exact science is directed towards truth and only the truth okay so you can see here is that Franco like a good thinker is whittling down what it is he's ultimately talking about here and language does so many things that he can't quite he can't he has to restrict the logic logical analysis of language in this way in order for it to be meaningful and as he's doing so he starts making these very interesting critiques about the humanities in the sciences and so on and so forth in 296 who's feel at I know whose drum starts Frigga adds that the contents of a sentence ought to go beyond the thoughts that are expressed by it and even also says that sometimes our senses actually failed to cross the thought of the matter as well so there's a way in which there are assertions sometimes our sentences sometimes go beyond the thought we have now there's also times in which our sentences can't quite grasp or capture the thought we have so there's sort of interesting sense of thought of what he thinks of thought is here and we're gonna see how to distinguish that a little bit here from ideas but there's another consideration worth mentioning and that is that context matters right so the same sense can mean two different things in two different context now this is an example I've put in here of course this is not frege's example but take for example the the the sentence Lincoln fights for justice well here's Abraham Lincoln who I'm talking about and I say the Abraham Lincoln fights for justice you probably have an idea about what that means right that he fought to end slavery and he fought for the Constitution and so on and so forth of the United States now that's what now notice that that statement because I've shown you this picture has a specific context but what if I show you this context right and I say Lincoln fights for justice if you're not familiar with what this is this is a sort of berated movie that came out a number of years ago called Abraham Lincoln vampire hunter in which Abraham Lincoln with his big axe you know goes into the woods at night outside of Washington DC and he fights vampires so if there was a character for instance in the movie that said Lincoln fights for justice in this context you would think that Lincoln actually fighting for justice means not freeing the slaves or fighting for the US Constitution but it means stopping demons and killing vampires right so you can see is that context actually matters quite a bit to how we understand the statements that we make in language now this is where what in order to articulate what a thought is frança recognized that it's very important for him to distinguish a thought from this notion of an idea so what does he mean by an idea well here we called it in modern philosophy there's a classic distinction here between the subjective and the objective this goes all the way back to the philosophy of Rene Descartes in which Descartes for is this articulates the idea that I think there for him coquito ergo soon right and then de cartes entire goal was therefore to then beginning with the subjective get to the objective in a modern feel and he which wasn't successful and this is a classic disputes between inner and outer so we have ideas in our mind which are only ours right it's it's their their presentations and what Fraggle wants to say is that the word idea he wants to reserve for the inner subjective experience in consciousness that we have right when he says a thought he's thinking of that as being something that's gonna be ultimately objective so the idea is inner he says on two ninety-nine ideas cannot be seen or touched they cannot be smelled nor tasted nor heard and not just because you can't see or touch or hear them it's because they're always subjective so in a certain way everyone always it only has their own ideas about the world and what Fraggle wants to articulate here is that logic isn't about the structure of the ideas we have logic is ultimately about articulating the truth conditions for the thoughts we have where a thought is not the same thing as an idea so let's go through his discussion of ideas here imagine you go on a walk with someone through the park or on a baseball field or something and you see green grass you see the trees you're both experiencing greenness you're seeing green things but you don't actually know that the other person's green is the same green you see right think of these problems about color blindness for instance or think about John Locke's discussion of primary and secondary qualities of perception right but what we can say here is that while I'm walking with my wife in the park and I'm seeing the green fields that both of us are seeing the same thing but I don't know that her idea of the green is the same as my idea of cream maybe her green is really my blue and so on and so forth so we can see is that we have different ideas right now what we have to do is then articulate so number one ideas and thoughts are not the same thing and ideas are inner and subjective but number two that means that ideas are always had or in other words ideas are something that someone experiences they belong to the content of someone's consciousness right so you don't so for instance you could say is that when you go to a library and you look at the books you're not looking at a a log of ideas right the only way in which you can have ideas is if you read the book right and you generate within your consciousness of these things we call ideas right of ideas number three need a bearer so that means that since ideas are had they happen there has to be someone who actually bears those ideas and here's the example of colorblindness that's why I put this sort of red circle like red square here right because if you're colorblind you may not recognize the difference between red and another color now I'm not too familiar with colorblindness but what we can say is that red is a state of my consciousness that is really incomparable to that of another person so I never know what red is like for you and never know what it's like for me so whether or not we really have the same ideas about things can actually never be answered in principle they can't be answered in principle because all of our consciousness is our entire consciousness is populated with ideas but those ideas are in principle subjective which means I can never know what yours ideas are because if I were to know what your ideas were well your ideas would no longer be subjective they would become objective so you can see here is that what Frank is doing is he's trying to address the discussion of thinking and objectivity in in terms of its relationship to modern philosophy and the the danger the worry that all we have are subjective and all we have is subjective knowledge or subjective ideas so this leads friggen to number four the idea is that not only are ideas had and not only our ideas have a bearer but they only have one bearer right so that means that no two people can have the same ideas so the consequence though is that thoughts have to be different from ideas because this means that you and I can have the same i I'm sorry you and I cannot have the same ideas but what happens for instance when we think about the Pythagorean theorem right take a look here's the Pythagorean theorem right here I'm not going to go through it and read it to you and explain it I'm assuming you know what the Pythagorean theorem is here a square plus B squared equals C squared here's a little geometric proof or demonstrable graphic but guess what the Pythagorean theorem to be the same for you as it is for me right a squared plus B squared equals C squared doesn't mean something different for you and it doesn't mean something different for me we know this because number one mathematics requires it and number two we're not sure what that would mean exactly right so that means that when we're doing something like learning or thinking about the Pythagorean theorem we're doing something that goes beyond merely the realm of ideas because it's not merely subjective it's objective right let's think for instance that when you're in your logic class or you're in a mathematics class and everyone's doing a proof let's say you're doing a proof in trigonometry and math right maybe a proofs a bad example but let's say you're you're calculating a problem and trigonometry everyone's going to get the same answer well why if everyone's ideas are different well it must mean there's a different domain here because if ideas were thoughts then what we end up with is some type of solipsism either on the one hand we end up with the the Dreaming problem that you see and take card how do I know that not everything I'm experiencing is just a dream that I myself am creating it's some sort of mass hallucination right think about this idea while you're watching this video maybe you're not actually watching this video maybe you were in a car accident then you're actually in a coma and this is merely a dream this is the dream problem and it seems to be a variant of solipsism now then I hear there's idealism and idealism you can take a look at the work of George Berkeley there's an early British empiricist idealist and his argument is that everything is ideas he argues that the physical world is not physical at all the physical world is not populated with things it's populated with ideas and the reason Berkeley argue this is because well how do I know that all I have are my ideas I don't know that there's I'm looking at a computer right now as I'm recording this I have an idea the computer in my head there's an image of it being generated in my consciousness but how do I know that that idea actually corresponds again to something outside of my head the answer is I can never know because all I have are my ideas at the computer I can never has to work climb outside of myself climb outside of my own skull in order to double-check that I'm perceiving the world correctly and so this means that that's one of the consequences if we equated or let's say equivocated the concepts of ideas and thought together and it means that there's really sort of one of two possibilities either an idea is an object of awareness or thoughts are limited to the extent that idea is or is not possible take a look at this quote from page 303 of the essay he says either the thesis that only what is my idea can be the object of my awareness is false or all my knowledge and perception is limited to the range of my ideas to the state to the state of my consciousness and in fact this suggestion seems to be the idea right because it looks like that if quote if we call what happens in our consciousness an idea then we really experience only ideas but not their causes right so but the fact that there is causes suggest otherwise it also suggests this idea that that whatever laws are implicit for our ideas because ideas are the means by which we understand the world they too must also delimit what is possible for our thoughts so it's quite interesting right so what it means is that it will see edmund husserl next week really takes up this notion and this suggestion in a full-fledged way in his phenomenology but we'll talk about that next week so it's quite interesting let's keep going here so that means this means that Frigga develops ultimately argued against metaphysical ideality ilysm again metaphysical idealism is the idea that reality is really populated with nothing other than ideas right and if that's the case there's only one set of ideas you know and that's your own right so here's his argument though he says quote if everything is idea then there is no bearer of ideas if there is no bearer of ideas then there are also no ideas for ideas need a bearer without which they can't exist if there's no ruler there's also no subjects by comparison so the dependence which I found myself induced to for all the experience as opposed to the experience or experience er is abolished if there is no bear so when this is the part I want to emphasize here is he says what I call ideas are the independent objects every reason is wanted for granting an exceptional position to that object which I call I so there's a very rich passage here which ultimately articulates a reason why ideas can't simply be all there is because if that was the case then peat there could be people to have those ideas right because people aren't ideas they just apprehend or conceive the world with ideas or through ideas or something like this so the object of a thought is not the content of my consciousness now let's take this back load that why is this an important insight for Frager to think about here well consider mathematics right he's a mathematician that's his sort of prime target he wants to defend mathematics against a whole range of potential psychic versions of psychologism for instance but what he wants to argue here is that my thought of the object of my thought isn't the same thing as that which is in my brain right notice here that people frequently sort of say that right they'll say that your thought is really just the electricity that's fired at the neurons firing in your brain well we might say is that the neurons firing in your brain seems signifier come along with the content of your consciousness which is of course for instance your ideas but that's not the same thing as the Pythagorean theorem so imagine this imagine you you were doing great you put someone MRI machine and you're watching their brain activity and you ask them to think about the Pythagorean theorem well as the apart machine takes pictures of their brain activity or what not right what you'll but you have a picture of maybe is the way which their brains are manufacturing ideas but what you don't have is you don't have the object of that thought being taking a picture of right because think if I'm thinking about the Pythagorean theorem MRI machine well if you were to capture the object of my thought well you should draw a picture of a Pythagorean of a Trevor right triangle which you should see as it were so this means this is very important there's a difference here between consciousness and our states of consciousness as opposed to the objective things that our thoughts are about right so one of the things that ultimately is concerned with to Ephratah is is defending logic right and the I guess it would have be the the transcendental conditions for logic and here's an example think about a doctor who perceives a patient's pain but can't figure it out so he goes to another doctor and tells the doctor about the firt about the patient's pain well notice here is that for the patient there if the patient has the pain and the pain is really an idea in the in the patient right they're experiencing it the doctor doesn't have the idea of the pain but they do have a thought of the pain right they have the thought of the person's idea in that when this doctor goes to his you know the other doctor in order to discuss his patients pain this doctor has a has an idea of this thought of this idea it won't say tore in other words the doctor B has a thought of the patient's pain insofar as it was directed to him through the thoughts of doctor a so in other words the - all these people have different ideas but they're all concerned with the same thought which is the patient's pain or in other words quote both doctors have the invalids pain which they do not bear as their common object of thought it can be seen from this that not only a thing but also an idea can be the common object of thought of people who did not have an idea but not every object of the understanding is an idea because not everything is an idea right so what happens then with people understand the same thought what does that mean exactly for two people to understand the same thought well Franco says quote in thinking we do not produce thoughts but we apprehend them for what I've called thoughts stand in the closest relation to truth now notice here is that when I say a plus a squared plus B squared equals C squared is true right the truth of it isn't grounded in my idea or my con the truth of it is grounded in the objective characteristics or qualities related to right angle triangles right so the thought stands closer to the truth than the idea and that means that when I recognize and I understand the Pythagorean theorem I'm apprehending a thought I'm not making a thought and in fact if we go to that first question we asked at the beginning of the lecture here which was are our thoughts discovered or are they made built or created by us I think that frege's answer is quite clear of course we can make we can make up things but when we're things the Pythagorean theorem and we're talking about indicative sentences that can be true what we're talking about ultimately is the apprehension of thought not the creation of an idea so what is a fact and think of the way in which we talk about the importance that facts should be the basis upon our decisions well what is the fact a fact is a thought that is true a fact is a thought that is true so it's not internal you can see here is that Freya is ultimately arguing against any sort of kind of subjectivity not any sort of subjective but these altima argued against the subjective framework that is indicative of a psychologist now franca has a number of commitments that I think are worth mentioning here the first year the first two I've just taken directly for this quotes here for the paper but the first commitment he seems to articulate is that quote the work of science does not consist of creation but of the discovery of true thoughts so science doesn't create its truths it discovers them right in some ways it's very much wrong to say that Isaac Newton invented of the laws of motion no we don't say that we say that Isaac Newton discovered the laws of motion and he discovered them because they were true regardless of him regardless of his ideas they were always going to be true and always were true number two not everything is an idea though otherwise psychology would contain all the sciences within it or at least it would be the highest judge over all Sciences otherwise for instance psychology would rule over logic in mathematics which would be quite problematic right obviously there is a relationship between logic in psychology because one cannot think in lot when we cannot think logically without certain necessary and sufficient psychological conditions but psychology is not what the sciences themselves are studying and ultimately to understand of the Pythagorean theorem is not to understand a psychological idea it is to understand something about triangles themselves so number three what we can say is that thoughts are objectively independent of subjective ideas they're objectively independent of subjective ideas so there is a sort of problem here that we should mention and that's the notion that we have to remember that thoughts are not real in the solution how can we figure there's thoughts are not real a missense is that you don't find thoughts in the world right you just discover that they that President Trump really is the president all Trump really is the president so thoughts are not real in the way that chairs and cats and people are so how do we explain the way in which thoughts can have truth and the answer here is going to relate to what ultimately Frager refers to as the timelessness of a thought so the solution is that the truth of a thought is timeless whoops I want to read you two quotations they come towards the end of his essay here he said whoops zoom out he says and yet what value could there be for us in the eternally unchangeable which could which could neither undergo effects nor have effects on us something entirely and in every respect inactive would be unreal and not existent for us even the timeless if it is to be anything for us must somehow be implicated with the temporal what would have thought be for me that was never apprehended by me but by apprehending a thought I can come into a relationship or in a relation to it and to me so it is possible that the same thought that is thought to by me today was not the thought but yesterday but in this way the strict timelessness is of course in doles but what is inclined to distinguish between essential and in essential properties and to regard something as timeless if the chief the changes it undergoes involve only it's in essential properties so a property of a thought would be called in essential which consists in or follows for the fact that it's apprehended by the thinker so when Fraga let me observe being a little sense of that fragrance notion here is that consider the idea that the truth of the statement that of the Pythagorean theorem a squared plus B squared equals C squared is timeless it's always going to be true be true no matter what because it's ultimately related to these objective characteristics or objects but also so but also consider the fact that when I think of thought there is a temporal dimension that I introduce so I could think of thought today that I did think about yesterday but that doesn't mean that the timelessness of it here is is what it that doesn't mean that the suggestion that the truth of a thought is is grounded in the fact that it's a time blur it's something that's timeless and is independent of the changing conditions of our world right because guess what once I am NOT an essential element to the Pythagorean theorem I don't essential element to these declarative indicative senses that express thoughts right just because I'm thinking it doesn't mean that I have to be the one that's thinking it right and it doesn't have to occur at in time so there's this really interesting discussion in a sort of exploration about time that I think's interesting let me give you another quote here he says quote thoughts are by no means unreal but their reality is of is of quite a different kind from that of things and their effect is brought about by the act of the thinker without which they would be ineffective at least as far as we can see and yet the thinker does not create them but must take them as they are they can't be true without being apprehended by a thinker and are not wholly unreal even then at least if they could be apprehended and by this means to be brought into operation and this actually sort of is the concluding thought of frege's discussion what a thought is and so some of the big takeaways for you is to consider that frege's view is that if thought is distinguished from an idea a thought can be objective an idea is only subjective and that our senses ultimately express thoughts right that's one of the big takeaway here and you know what I'm hoping that this discussion that we've had with Freight here well serve as a nice wage for you to begin to organize for yourself what some of the basic elements are within the philosophy of language and also organize for you with some of the basic problems within the philosophy language of what those problems are within the philosophy of language now I wanted to next is turn to another essay of frege's which is called sense and reference it's probably the most famous essay me he did for the nod logicians I'm not gonna go through that essay fully but I'm gonna try to hone it and articulate what some of those key points are and it begins really with this question of identity and notice that our words write our word I can use a phrase to talk about something in two different ways so notice how I can say that I can either we're not talking about a bachelor I could to find him I could call someone a bachelor or I could call someone an unmarried man and they would mean the same thing right so the question there is how does that work right there I guess I'm expressing one thought but I have different senses right I could say that I could say Jo is a bachelor or I could say Jo's an unmarried man right both of those have the same thought but they have different ways of going about thinking it so this sort of raises an interesting question it which is also new this question of identity and to be clear this sa sense in reference is very important because it's also stanzas one of as I mentioned earlier in frege's work he develops the big rift shift and then he works on their the very important work the foundations for arithmetic but ultimately and then eventually as Russell's paradox which shows that the system he develops in the arithmetic is fails it's contradictory or paradoxical right you can see before Russell's paradox this essay was written and I think what we're starting to see in this essay is that froggen is beginning to anticipate some of the the problematic elements within his logical system we don't have time to go through that because it's actually quite complex they require a long discussion really thats related to set theory so I'm not going to go through that now but so that's sort of part of the background of this essay but you can see here is that this essay does have a relationship to the one we just looked at right because we can ask the question how is it that we can have a single thought for multiple ways of talking about it so in other words is identity right bachelor unmarried man is identity a relation between objects or between sides right that is is identity a relationship between the things of the world or about the words were using exactly and here franca is fully aware of of the implications within the history of philosophy regarding this discussion excuse me so for instance take this relationship a equals a I could say it the cat is the cat right that's a tautology and from a Content framework that's a priori right the identity of the cat being the cat is something that is given you don't have to go look and check whether or not the cat is the cat right the cat is always the cat regardless of your experience of the cat so that means that the type of idea we see in tautologies or tautological statements is always an identity that has an off priori determination but what about what I say that the cat is Jo like maybe I named my cat Jo and I say the cat is Jo well there I'm creating a synthetic relationship that really takes the form of the structure a equals B where a is cat and B is Jo the named Jo and somehow I'm synthesizing them together and and that requires us to know something that comes from experience or in other words it's a posteriori so once we're not gonna get into caught right here you can take a look at some of my introductory videos on call it if you like but I want you to know or at least to recognize your Frigga is well aware of his position and and where the types of problems he's interested fit with in the history of philosophy and of course caught as a primary oh that what did that so okay if identities a relation well then should I equals a and a equals B actually really say the same thing right should the relationship be the same right and ultimately we'll see what won't I'll read this on page 26 and by the way I should say is that the sense reference article has been published in many ways the page numbers I'm giving here come from the original text so you can look at this at the side pagination of course he wrote this I believe originally a German so but this is the original pagination for the German text so on page 26 of that text insensate reference frege's says quote a difference can arise only if the difference between the sides corresponds to a difference in the mode of presentation of that which is designated right so when I said Bachelor versus unmarried male what I seem to have there is a difference in the way in which I'm presenting my thought right so we have here is that what we could say is that when they say that every word or every has a sign then every side has two parts of it it has a sense and it has a reference now a sense is something that competin possess a name and a referent is something to which a name can refer right so the big most famous example that frigate has of this is the morning star in the evening star now what is the moon the morning star is I don't know if you've ever heard of this phrase many people have it but the morning star refers to the plate of Venus and here's Venus and ironically the evening star also is a phrase that's used to refer to Venus and I think that has to do with the idea that early in the morning you can see Venus on the horizon and the same thing in there either early evening if I'm not wrong right so the morning star in the evening star both refer to the same planet so we have a similar sort of problem when we had before we have two different ways of saying something they both ultimately are referring to the same thing and now you can get let me go backwards now you can get a sense of what this sense reference distinction is so we can say is that we have that the sign if we take the sign being the the morning star that has its cents but it has the same referent as the evening star right so there's two different ways in which we could talk about the same thing being the case let me sorry I keep going up and down his lovers picture of Venus but why is this important for his logic ultimately right the reason it's so important for his logic is because in his systematic logic for what frigate does is he formalizes through simple through symbolic mechanism the relationship that our late that our words have with each other when we make categorical stay that's it or not or just basic propositional statements of the problem though is that in his system right it's assumed that if you make a statement that statement means just that and nothing else also means that and the problem with this one of the paradox one of the elements that eventually comes out of this paradox and his system is that his system is actually sort of unable altima T to make sense of these sorts of problems the problems were the morning star the evening star mean the same thing despite having very different senses right so you can see is that there's two different senses for the same reference now a sense does not necessarily have a reference in reality that's important so if I say the current King of France right that has a sense because it's a it's a statement right but it doesn't have a reference because there is no current king of France so this is very important element to recognize that our language also not only can our language be so multifarious that we can use different senses to refer to the same reference we can even talk about things for which there is no reference whatsoever so we can actually where have signs that just refer to others signs now a referent can be but it's not necessarily a definite object right because a referent could potentially be someone else's and so on and so forth here's two quotations to leave you with or that's leave it but to give you number one the regular connection between aside its sense and its referent is of such a kind that to the sign there corresponds a definite sense and to that in turn a definite referent well to a given reference single sign and now and then a little bit later on that same page of 27 he says to every expression belonging to a complete totality of science there should certainly correspond a definite sense but language often doesn't satisfy this condition and what must be seen I'm sorry one of us be content of the same word has the same sense in the same context so here we have this sort of interesting suggestion or a comet that I think will become important for us later especially when we look at the philosophical work of Ludwig Dickens time which is daily did if it according to the way in which Freya is trying to create really a systematic logical taxonomy for language here right ultimately every expression should have a definite referent of course what I'm sorry should have a definite sense but the problem is is that language doesn't actually always do this and well we're left with this we will use our words at all these different contexts so what I want you to take play pecos close attention to here is the way in which frege's articulation of sets and reference will ultimately bumped up against the messiness of language it bumps up against the idea that our language is not just something that is about the world but it seems to be something that's finally tied up with the world in terms of context this will be important when we get to vacant status discussion of language later well we can say is that this is reveals the imperfection of human language and this for instance becomes really I would say is the modern problem of logic in Leeson this early modern or this early period of modern philosophy or contemporary philosophy and that's the notion that our language simply doesn't seem to be up to the task of talking about the world in a systematic way that we would like to have not the way which we seem to be able to arrive at this in mathematics though I should say Frigga even said the same problem the sense reference problem also exists within mathematics so you know it's not as definite in the same way now there's many different forms of aside for instance that he takes note of versus consider quotations so for instance I maybe have a side for my ethics class I'm assigned by students to write a paper on John Stuart Mill's utilitarianism and potentially maybe they quote the very famous passage of John Stuart Mill where he says it's better to be Socrates dissatisfied than to be a pig that is satisfied now that's a quotation what is a quotation when we think about the sense reference distinction well the answer is this that a quotation is the sign of another side right and in this so it's a sign of a sign of a referent that taught that John Stuart Mill was making take the other example of a report exactly as a report when we think about this sense reference distinction well what frança suggests is that a report is really an indirect referent it's a way of pointing out what the referent of a statement is but indirectly because you have to report on it you're not actually observing it or or recognizing it yourself and we're at least we're talking about it in the way which we have a direct referent so what this means is that or one of the consequences of this is that the sense reference of a sign is not a concept right so you could ask well we have concepts in in this essay it seems to me it ought to be honest I'm not a Frankie Frankie and scholar but it seems to me in this essay although I know that there's a there's a great essay on function and concept where Frank articulates what he means by a concept so related to this earlier essay we're looking at a thought what we could say is that the sense reference of a son is not the thought it's not the object of a thought and it or is the nor is it an idea right the synthesized reference is not a concept he says quote the conception is subjective one man's conception is not that of another ok so I made me misspoke there I think what he means by concept is what he talks about is D good idea in our earlier essay he goes on quote just as one man connects this conception and another conception with the same word so also one man can associate this says and another with that sense so if two persons can see the same each still has their own conception now that means that so that's really quite interesting so that means that the sense reference distinction here really concerns about the mechanics and the structure of the way meeting operates which isn't the same thing as talking about the way in which our ideas and our concepts operate now there's there's sort of three different levels that we could apply the sense reference distinction to what would be words like the word bachelor and there would be expressions like unmarried man or hall senses like he is an unmarried man so at each one of those levels we see the sense we see different senses potentially with the same effort potentially with no reference or potentially with different reference but it's important to recognize these sort of distinct levels of analysis that are possible now let's ask this question since it's possible data sets without a reference what about a declarative sentence well give this fragrance the example of the that Odysseus was set ashore in Ithaca while sound asleep now there's a sense that has a definite sense right Odysseus was a person who they left him on the beach while he was asleep in Ithaca but you could see there is it what we have is a definite sense so we know what's happening but you can see what about the referent there we we have difficulty because the the referent there to Odysseus does that refer to a real person or not and probably not or if it does refer to a real person not a person who has left on shore in Ithaca while sound asleep like the Homeric poem what indicate so you can see here is that as soon as we start to recognize the Odysseus element notice Odysseus is a word that has its own referent and then the rest of it is also a sense for something that happens to Odysseus he says quote thot loses value for us as soon as we recognize that the referent or one of its parts is missing and there's an aside call it not psychology a phraseology here that that I think frege's beginning to develop and that's number one is a proper day which expresses its sense but it refers to or designates its own referent but there's also a declarative sentence which contains a thought and the thought is the object right so senses can use different words to refer to the same thing that is senses can use different words or expressions to refer to the same thought they have the same object but they have different senses now the truth of the truth value of a sense is its reference and this is actually I think frege's core thesis in the essay so I think most people who read the essay really just focus on the basic setup up between sense and reference his view here is through what exactly is the referent of a declarative sense let's say what I say that Donald Trump is the curved president of the United States what's the referent of that sentence sort of weird exactly it's clear that Donald Trump is a person and there's a reference to Donald Trump there's a reference to the presidency but what about this complex of things well you can see here is that the truth value is the referee at least that's his suggestion he says quote subject and predicate which are understood in the in the classic logical says are indeed elements of thought right they stand on the same level for knowledge and by combining subjects and predicates what reaches only a thought but never passes from a sense to its referent never from a thought to its truth value now one moves at the same level but never advances from one level to the next so a truth value cannot be part of a thought any more than say the son kid for it is not a sense but an object right and so that means that what is a judgment will a judgment therefore is when we move from a thought to the truth value so the referent of a sense is not always its truth I though right so he makes the suggestion that the truth value can actually be the referent of declarative sentence but he says that's not always the case for instance what if someone says it seems to me that Donald Trump is the President of the United States well it seems to me indicates the provisionality right which means that there is no truth value there because there you're saying that you're not sure essentially but that you're indicating what you think though that means that the referent a sentence is not always its truth value despite his suggestion that a truth value can operate as a referent now there is a there's a deeper reason why ultimately frege's arguing this and again it has to go back to his defense for the arithmetic of the foundations of arithmetic and ultimately his concepts script in his logical system now let's go forward here one thing we can notice here is that what happens when we replace a word with another phrase because what we're gonna see is that when you replace one says what says with another that has the same truth value that doesn't always guarantee that you have the same the identity of the same referent so take this first example someone says Columbus inferred from the roundness of the earth that he could reach India by traveling toward the west now let's take this word the earth and let's replace it with this little phrase here right so so now the sentence reads Columbus inferred from the roundness of the planet which is accompanied by a moon whose diameter is greater than the fourth part of its own that he could reach India by traveling towards the west now take a look here we have what looks like to the sentences that look the same except the first sentence has the earth in the Senate the second sentence has the planet which is accompanied by a moon whose diameter is greater than the fourth part of its own now we know that the earth is the same as the planet which is accompanied by a moon whose diameter Blanc like a plague we know they're the same thing but you can see R is that the sentence is very different because Columbus inferred from the roundness of the earth Columbus did not infer from the astronomical data about the moon in its relationship to the earth that you could reach India by traveling to the west so you can see here is that these these two sentences despite saying the same thing and ultimately or they don't say the same thing but this is despite having very similar senses right have different reference consequent to the way in which that that subject phrase was was made another example he who discovered the elliptical form of the planetary orbits died in misery right so in this sentence the referent of the sentence is not a truth value the referent is Kepler right because Kepler is the person who discovered the elliptical form and he's the person who died in misery so there's another example that the truth value thesis that Frigga offers us here is not always the case right and how does frigate deal with this because Franco ultimately wants to wrap up a nice systematic he wants to have a nice systematic uh argument or theory for meaning his argument his response is that well human language is incomplete right he says quote a logically complete language such as the bigger script should satisfy it satisfy the conditions that every expression grammatically well constructed as a proper name out of science already introduced shall in fact designated object and that no new signs shall be introduced as a proper name without having a referee shirt so we have a very I think sort of puzzling suggestion or response by Fraga which is that frege's seems to suggest that the problem is not his theory the problem is human language right human language itself is incomplete and that's why we end up with as it were the this problem that even though the truth value of statement is the referent you have these other sorts of uses of language that don't fit that model right so which is sort of kind of you can tell he's frustrated by the analysis here now what about hypothetical thoughts right think about when you you say you make a hypothesis if this was the case that this would be the case and so on and so forth well he says that a hypothetical thought is something which establishes a reciprocal reciprocal relationship between two thoughts right if this thought this thought will occur and you see there's a there's a reciprocal reciprocality in a reciprocal relationship now if you want to get if you wanted to zoom ahead the very last section of the sets and reference si pages 46 to 50 really go through the review of the problem where he lays out everything that I've mentioned so far in this video so if you if so I would encourage you if you haven't read the essay and you don't have time to read it all go to these pages and read his conclusion but I do want to end our video by with Fraga by really encouraging you to think about the idea that frege's theory and it's sort of like a shipwreck on the beach he has these suggestions but for every a thesis he gives verses the most important thesis I think after he or tqex the sense reference dichotomy is the idea that the truth value of a sin is its referent that's not always true right and it responds to that Franco says well it's hard to exhaust all the possibilities that are given by language but and he goes on to defend his position the reason I'm sort of sending the the discussion here is what I want to see here is that Fraga on the one hand is analyzing what it means to think what it means to have ideas analyzing the the complex structure that our ideas have in terms of sense reference our concepts in our thoughts but it's clear that that despite his systematicity there is something that our language is unable to capture and I wanna this is the end of our first video in this series and contemporary philosophy because I want to suggest to you that what we're gonna see in the foregoing videos and in the foregoing discussions with these various philosophers is that contemporary philosophy is ultimately I think in a survey trying to articulate the exaust ability of the instrument for this way that is tried to articulate the exaust ability of the inexhaustible and there's a way in which meaning sort of overflows and goes beyond our ability to grasp it despite that we grasp things as meaningful and so that is our first discussion in contemporary philosophy looking at Gottlob frege's sense in reference as well as a thought his discussion of thinking thank you very much for watching this video and I'll see you guys next time we take a look at a philosopher who has very very similar set of problems and that is Edmund Husserl thank you very much for watching I'll see you guys all night

Channel: Mark Thorsby

Views: 16,955

Rating: 4.9298244 out of 5

Keywords: Frege, Sense and Reference, Logic, Thought, Idea

Id: ZOoR1IUmwY0

Length: 82min 45sec (4965 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 04 2018