UC Davis

Frege’s exposition of the notion of thought has delivered a Platonist reading as the dominant interpretation of his work. On that reading, the direction of explanation is from thoughts, as third realm entities, to subjects’ grasping, judging and reasoning, but the relation between thoughts and subjects’ cognition is left unexplained. The present work parses through Frege’s arguments for positing thoughts, beginning with the primacy of truth and ending with the two roles thoughts are purported to play. On this reading, the direction of explanation is from reality to subjects’ cognition and reasoning, but by way of the only possible means of epistemic access subjects have to reality; namely, thoughts.I put forth that there are two distinct accounts for the objectivity of thoughts; one which is based on their intersubjectivity, qua thinkers’ shared cognitive and reasoning capacities, and another, based on their veridicality, qua their truth as determined by whether they accurately represent reality. These two accounts are explained by showing that for Frege it is the truth of thoughts that is considered timeless and mind-independent, while the being of a thought is explained by the possibility of its being shared amongst thinkers in discourse. The tools for such discourse are reviewed by considering various features of natural and what Frege calls logically perfect languages. The above two roles for thoughts are then mapped onto senses of sentential components in two capacities; (1) as their cognitive values, and (2) as their semantic values. It is thus argued that although Frege’s analysis is packed with Platonist metaphors, the outlook he ultimately puts forth is explicable in terms of the role thoughts play in thinkers’ cognitive relation to reality.