Seminar Notes - Frege

Frege is often referred to as the father of analytic philosophy; well known for his theories on the philosophy of language.

Frege believed that a sentence, or proposition, has two characteristics; sense and reference. The thought of a proposition is it's sense, and the subject of a sentence is it's reference.

Unlike Aristotle, Frege believed that the meaning of a sentence is not contained in the words or connected of the object; it is the sentence that gives the meaning not the individual words. For example, with the proposition 'the cat sat on the mat', the meaning is given through the combination an position of the words, not through the words themselves. Frege believed that words are purely nominal, it makes no difference what you call something, or if you use more than one name for the same thing.

According to Frege, a proposition can be one of three things. It can be true, false or meaningless. In order for a proposition to be true or false, it must have a point of reference. For example, the proposition 'The present King of France is bald' makes sense and we can understand it. However, as there is no King of France, there is no point of reference, and therefore it is not verifiable, and so is meaningless. A meaningless sentence can be useful, but is purely emotive.

Frege also introduced the idea of logical positivism - expressing a negative as a positive. For example, the proposition 'nobody is on the road' is not meaningful because 'nobody' is a logical object; nothing is something. Frege solved this problem by making the negative a positive:

For all possible roads, no object is on the road. This is true.

(Argument) (Function)

This solved the problem because the proposition has a sense and a reference point and so is verifiable. This methodology launched positivism.

In his book Language, Truth and Logic (1936) philosopher, A.J Ayer argues the idea of the verification principle in relation to logical positivism. The verification principle was an expansion on Frege's ideas of meaningless propositions. Ayer believed that the only sentences worth discussing are those which can be verified empirically, and that propositions that cannot be verified are merely expressions of emotions. For example, the statement 'God exists' is not verifiable, and so is meaningless. The verification principle was later expanded to claim that statements can be meaningful if they could be verified in theory or in actuality. However, a criticism of the verification principle is that the principle itself cannot be verified; and so in theory is itself meaningless.

Karl Popper introduced the Falsification Principle, claiming that propositions are meaningful if they can be falsified. It means that to assert something is to deny something else. For example, the statement 'all men are immortal' is falsifiable with the presentation of one dead man. However, the statement 'all men are mortal' is not falsifiable because just because to date all men have been mortal does not mean to say that there will not one day be a man who is immortal. Therefore, the statement that 'all men are mortal' is meaningless because it is not falsifiable. Anthony Flew used the falsification principle to draw the conclusion that all religious statements are meaningless.

Philosopher, Richard Swinburne, used an analogy of toys in a cupboard to challenge the falsification principle. He stated 'there are toys in my cupboard that come alive when no one is able to detect them.' Swinburne used this as a challenge claiming that even though it is not falsifiable but that the concept of the toy's coming alive had enough meaning for us to be able to understand it.

I think I agree with the idea that if something is not verifiable it is purely emotive, however I do not agree that it is therefore meaningless, or not worth discussing. I think that it is the emotive propositions that are the most interesting parts of conversations.