A Haunting Conviction: Frege on Truth and Logic by James Edwin Hutchinson a Dissertation Submi Ed in Partial Satisfaction of T

A Haunting Conviction: Frege on Truth and Logic by James Edwin Hutchinson A dissertation submi�ed in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Commi�ee in charge: Professor John Campbell, Co-Chair Professor John MacFarlane, Co-Chair Professor Line Mikkelsen Spring 2018 A Haunting Conviction: Frege on Truth and Logic Copyright 2018 by James Edwin Hutchinson Abstract A Haunting Conviction: Frege on Truth and Logic by James Edwin Hutchinson Doctor of Philosophy in Philosophy University of California, Berkeley Professor John Campbell, Co-Chair Professor John MacFarlane, Co-Chair Many of us think that truth is prior to science: though it belongs to the nature of science to pursue truth, the nature of truth does not involve science. Frege denies this. He thinks that to be true is to play a role in the characteristic goals of science, such as explanation. For Frege and the Neo-Kantian philosophers in his philosophical milieu, the point of this view is that no truth is trivial: every one makes a contribution to a deep understanding of the world. �is allows them to maintain that truth is a value, whose signi�cance is rivalled only by that of the Good and the Beautiful.�is view leads Frege to a normative conception of logic, on which the logical laws are the ones that tell us how we ought to judge if we are to achieve our highest scienti�c goals. Since the nature of truth itself is to be found in such goals, these laws tell us about truth itself. �is makes possible an epistemology for logical axioms that has frustrated readers by its apparent inconsistency: Frege seems both to rule out arguing for logical axioms, and himself to o�er arguments for them. But he only means to rule out arguments that derive the axioms from other truths that we are already justi�ed in accepting. His own arguments, by contrast, derive them from a goal: they show us that the axioms must be true if that goal is to be reached.�e goal in question is the construction of a logical system; but because such a system is needed in every science, the goal is none other than truth itself. Frege’s discussions of truth and logic are conducted independently of any claims about language, which sits badly with his reputation as the herald of the “linguistic turn,” who proclaims the philosophy of language to be the foundation of all philosophy.�is calls for a re-evaluation of the role of language in Frege’s philosophy. I argue that Frege’s philosophy of language is a grand technological project in linguistic engineering: he does not aim to describe language, but to change it so that we can reach the truth more e�ectively. Reading Frege this way helps us understand the most puzzling passages in his early work, and, I hope, points us to a resolution of the outstanding puzzles in his later philosophy of language as well. 1 Preface An undergraduate student was telling me recently about his�nal paper for a class on the theory of meaning. He told me that he planned to describe a counterexam- ple to a certain theory of reference—“because,” he added, “that’s what you do.” I puzzled over this unprompted addition as he described his paper, which centered on the description of an odd sort of case. While the theory in question implied that in such a case, the referent of a certain name is a certain person, this student thought that the referent was someone else. “Or anyway,” he continued, unprompted, with a shrug and a weary smile, “That’s the intuition I’m going to say that I have.” These remarks reminded me of my early undergraduate days. It seemed then that at the core of every philosophical argument stood a picturesque example, populated by Super-Spartans, colorblind neuroscientists, Gödel and Schmidt, and other characters. I was fairly certain that in branches of philosophy other than those that interested me, things worked the same way, though the examples were perhaps more gruesome—I heard grim rumours of drowning children, disturbing surgical procedures, and vehicles mowing pedestrians down en masse. The core of philosophical argument was to describe some characters in an odd situation, and to profess to be moved in some way, experiencing an “intuition”—an inner compulsion—to say something about that situation. A philosophical theory was the bold attempt to say something general such that no one would be able to tell a story that would produce an intuition that con�icts with that general claim. My own philosophical writing was replete with reports of strong intuitions. I expect, however, that I did not always feel those intuitions quite as strongly as I professed; and if asked why philosophers do this, I would have had little more to say than “that’s what you do.” I think I saw philosophy as largely like a game of strategy which, like all games, had somewhat arbitrary rules. (Not coincidentally, I was �rst drawn to philosophy by a formal logic class, with its usual focus on�nding proof-strategies to get from one place to another.) But by the time I graduated, I had learned that this was not all there is to philosophy. I was intrigued—even a little shocked—to read Gareth Evans’ claim that i “the truth or falsity of Russell’s Principle is not to be decided by evidence as to the pattern of ordinary English usage...the deliverances of untutored linguistic intuition may have to be corrected in the light of considerations of theory.”1 To use “considerations of theory” to trump intuitions was a major change to the rules of the game as I knew them. I had thought that “theories” were nothing more than at- tempts to make general claims without running afoul of intuitions. I increasingly began to read work that was characterized by principles rather than intuitions: the Principle of Acquaintance, the Generality Constraint, Russell’s Principle, the Con- text Principle, and more. At�rst, I was excited by the power of these principles: they were new, apparently winning moves in the philosophy game. But where do these “principles” and “considerations of theory” come from, and what explains their power? At crucial turning-points in their articles, I found philosophers asking a particular question: why do we care about this? In one paper that became a favourite of mine, for example, Richard Heck asks: “How...can we resolve disputes about whether someone has understood?...Let us...ask: why do we care whether we understand one another?”2 By answering this question, we can learn something central about what understanding is: answering this question yields a principle. Discovering this source of principles was a big discovery, because it allowed me to come up with my own principles—potentially unlimited winning moves in the philosophy game! But if I wanted that argumentative power, I had to think about why we care about the things we talk about in philosophy. These re�ections were the undoing of my thinking of philosophy as a game. I started to use these kinds of considerations to arrive at principles, and on this basis to determine how things are. But I quickly became uneasy about the approach I was pursuing. After all, why should what we care about have any con- sequences for how things are? This approach to philosophy seems to presuppose a connection between what is good (or what we want) and what is so. It is perhaps not surprising that an approach characterized by such a presupposition could spark serious philosophical interest,3 but if that really was the presupposition of this method, how could it be justi�ed? 1Evans 1982, 70. 2Heck 1995, 84. 3Plato’s Socrates describes his philosophical development in Phaedo, 97b-99c: “One day I heard someone reading, as he said, from a book of Anaxagoras, and saying that it is Mind that directs and is the cause of everything. I was delighted with this cause and it seemed to me good, in a way, that Mind should be the cause of all. I thought that if this were so, the directing Mind would direct everything and arrange each thing in the way that was best. If then one wishes to know the cause of each thing, why it comes to be or perishes or exists, one had to�nd out what was the best way for it to be, or to be acted upon, or to act. On these premises then it be�tted a man to investigate only...what is best...I would gladly become the disciple of any man who taught the workings of that kind of cause.” ii I didn’t know the answer, but I thought I knew where to look. All of my favourite philosophers—the ones who argued about language and logic from principles motivated by why we care about things—were very closely associated with Frege’s writings, and especially with Michael Dummett’s interpretation of them. Sure enough, the�rst few pages of the Foundations of Arithmetic�nds Frege rat- tling o� a numbered list of “fundamental principles,” and at crucial points in Dum- mett’s discussions we are sternly reminded how to pursue our questions: “Before we proceed further, let us ask what we want the notion of reference...for. If we do not keep asking that question, we are liable to fall victim to scholasticism.”4 I planned to study these works carefully someday, in order to understand this method better—and my resolve to do so increased whenever one of my fellow graduate students would reply to an argument of mine by saying something like: “Who cares what we want a notion of reference for? The facts about reference are what they are, independent of our wants! WhatI want is to get it right about reference.” But not only was I concerned to explore and justify this philosophical method, I also often found myself at a loss to pursue it.

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