Gottlob Frege Quotes on Mind
Gottlob Frege, the founder of modern logic, drew a sharp line between the mind and the objective contents it grasps, and the quotes gathered here present it. Against psychologism, Frege held, in a position marked here as attributed, that thoughts are objective, neither things in the external world nor ideas in the mind, so that logic studies a realm independent of any individual psychology. He distinguished the mere grasping of a thought from a judgment, which he defined as the admission of its truth. Frege also saw a liberating task for his work, hoping that his concept-notation might help break the domination of words over the human mind, freeing pure thought from the distortions of ordinary language. Drawn from the Begriffsschrift and his essays, these passages present the mind as an instrument that apprehends objective thoughts rather than the place where logic itself resides.
Quotes
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“Thoughts are objective; they are neither things in the external world nor ideas in the mind.”
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“If the task of philosophy is to break the domination of words over the human mind [...], then my concept notation, being developed for these purposes, can be a useful instrument for philosophers [...] I believe the cause of logic has been advanced already by the invention of this concept notation.”
Begriffsschrift (1879) Preface to the Begriffsschrift -
“This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica , a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from rhetorical embellishments, "modeled upon that of arithmetic", that is, constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules.”
paraphrasing Frege's Begriffsschrift, a formula language, modeled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought (1879) in Jean Van Heijenoort ed., in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (1967) -
“paraphrasing Frege's Begriffsschrift, a formula language, modeled upon that of arithmetic, for pure thought (1879) in Jean Van Heijenoort ed., in From Frege to Gödel: A Source Book in Mathematical Logic, 1879-1931 (1967)”
This ideography is a "formula language", that is, a lingua characterica , a language written with special symbols, "for pure thought", that is, free from rhetorical embellishments, "modeled upon that of arithmetic", that is, constructed from specific symbols that are manipulated according to definite rules. -
“A judgment, for me is not the mere grasping of a thought, but the admission of its truth.”
Über Sinn und Bedeutung, 1892 | Gottlob Frege (1892). On Sense and Reference , note 7. -
“Often it is only after immense intellectual effort, which may have continued over centuries, that humanity at last succeeds in achieving knowledge of a concept in its pure form, by stripping off the irrelevant accretions which veil it from the eye of the mind.”
Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, 1893 and 1903 | Translation J. L. Austin (Oxford, 1950) as quoted by Stephen Toulmin , Human Understanding: The Collective Use and Evolution of Concepts (1972) Vol. 1, p. 56.