Frege and Anti-Psychologism

Paper Summary:

This paper relates that F. L. G. Frege's rejection of psychologism states that, to understand logic one, must be strictly objective and deny subjective personal ideas to grasp fully the truth in logic. The author points out that Frege believed that one can grasp a thought but not create it because logical thoughts resided in the 'third realm' where everything is objective and is there to be discovered, independent of being grasped by anyone. The paper relates that, although Frege suggests language as the medium between thoughts and senses, he does not tell how they are connected. The author underscores that M. A. E. Dummett explains that a weakness of Frege is that he used a very rigid dichotomy of the concepts of objective or subjective. The paper concludes that Dummett's idea that one can reject both Platonism and psychologism by the notion of inter-subjectivity and language limits Frege's anti-psychologism argument.

From the Paper:

"According to Frege, if thought were "in the mind," it, like ideas, could not be communicated to one another; thus sliding into a relativistic notion of "truth". Frege understood 'thought'--"as an abstract structured entity constituted by senses which can be semantically assessed as true or as false, and it can be grasped- all which are objective elements not associated with psychological elements" (Cohen, 1998). Frege's central argument was that mathematics and logic are not a part of psychology, and that the objects and laws of mathematics are not explained by psychological observations or results. His examples of objective, non-psychological entities are numbers, for instance 2 + 3 = 5. Numbers are not ideas since they are the same for all people thus this leads Frege to conclude that a content of a sentence cannot be a mental image."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Green, K (1999).Was Wittgenstein Frege's hier? . The Philosophical Quarterly . 49, 2-20.
• Vassallo , N (1997).On Dummett's early Frege and analytical philosophy . 51, 1-3.
• Picardi, E (1997).Sigwart, Husserl and Frege on truth and logic, or is Psychologism still a threat? . European journal of philosophy. 2-20.
• Cohen, J (1998).Frege and psychologism. Philosophical Papers . 27, 45-67.
• Beaney, M (1997). The Frege reader. Maldon, MA: Blackwell Publishers.

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