Gottlob Frege Quotes on Truth
Gottlob Frege’s Begriffsschrift (1879), The Foundations of Arithmetic (1884), and the late papers “On Sense and Reference” and “Thought” gave the analytic philosophy of language and logic its founding statement and the modern philosophical analysis of truth its principal early-twentieth-century re-orientation. The central thesis is that truth is not a property of sentences as such but of the thoughts (Gedanken) the sentences express — abstract propositional contents whose truth-values are graspable by minds but exist independently of any particular cognitive episode — with the corresponding development of the function-argument analysis of predication that founded modern logic. The framework shaped Russell’s logicist program, the early Wittgenstein, the entire subsequent analytic tradition through Carnap and Davidson, and the contemporary debate over Fregean and neo-Fregean theories of meaning.
Quotes
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“Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher, and every good philosopher is at least half a mathematician.”
Attributed to Frege in: A. A. B. Aspeitia (2000), Mathematics as grammar: 'Grammar' in Wittgenstein's philosophy of mathematics during the Middle Period , Indiana University, p. 25 -
Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“Never ask for the meaning of a word in isolation, but only in the context of a proposition.”
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“The laws of truth are not psychological laws.”
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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“A statement of number contains an assertion about a concept.”
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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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Attributed to Gottlob Frege:
“An arithmetician finds the rules for the calculation of numbers, but he does not invent them.”
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“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.