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Did Frege Really Consider Truth As an Object?

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Did Frege Really Consider Truth As an Object? Grazer Philosophische Studien 75 (2007), 125–148. DID FREGE REALLY CONSIDER TRUTH AS AN OBJECT? Dirk GREIMANN Universidade Federal de Santa Maria Summary It is commonly assumed that the conception of truth defended by Frege in his mature period is characterized by the view that truth is not the property denoted by the predicate ‘is true’, but the object named by true sentences. In the present paper, I wish to make plausible an alternative interpretation according to which Frege’s conception is characterized by the view that truth is what is expressed in natural language by the “form of the assertoric sentence”. So construed, truth is neither an object (like the True) nor a property (like the Bedeutung of the predicate ‘is true’) but something of a very special kind that belongs to the same logical category as the logical relations (like subsumption). Th e main argument justifying this interpretation is that Frege’s explication of truth does not hold of the True, but only of truth, considered as what is expressed by the form of the assertoric sentence. Introduction What is truth? To determine this, we must previously answer the more fundamental question: What is the logical form of sentences containing the word ‘true’? With regard to the latter question, the competing theories of truth fall into two main categories: “conservative” and “revisionary” theories. Examples of the fi rst type are the traditional conceptions of truth as correspondence, coherence, usefulness, etc. Th ey start from the assump- tion that the logical category of the word ‘true’ agrees with its grammatical category. Since ‘true’ behaves grammatically like an adjective, they consider ‘true’ to be a logical predicate, that is, an expression that is actually used to ascribe a property. Th is analysis leads to the view that truth is the property denoted by the truth-predicate. Revisionary theories, on the other hand, claim that ‘true’ is a pseudo- predicate in the sense that sentences containing the word ‘true’ have a deep-structure in which ‘true’ does not really function as a predicate. According to the disquotation theory, for instance, the sentence ‘‘Snow is white’ is true’ has the deep-structure ‘Snow is white’, because the func- tion of the word ‘true’ is not to ascribe a property, but to neutralize the quotation marks. Th is analysis implies that the talk of truth as a property is based on a grammatical misunderstanding. In his mature period, Frege defended a conception of truth that agrees with the revisionary approach on the assumption that the grammar of natural language is misleading with regard to the nature of truth. He argued that the adjectival occurrence of ‘true’ in sentences like ‘Th e thought that sea-water is salty is true’ suggests that truth is a property of thoughts. Actually, however, the relation of the thought to the True does not corre- spond to “the relation between subject and predicate”, but to the “relation between the Sinn of a sign and its Bedeutung”. From this he inferred that truth is not a property. Frege’s positive account of the nature of truth seems to be characterized by the view that truth is an object. For this reason, his conception of truth is commonly seen as a strange “naming theory of truth” according to which truth is the object named by true sentences. Th e basis of this theory consists of the doctrine that, from a logical point of view, a sentence is a special proper name, namely, a proper name of a truth-value. In what follows, my aim is to show that on closer examination Frege did not defend the naming theory, but an “assertion theory of truth” according to which truth is what is expressed by the “form of the assertoric sentence”. Its core is the thesis that an assertoric sentence like ‘Sea-water is salty’ has the deep structure ‘ Salty(sea-water)’, where ‘ ’ is a truth-operator whose counterpart in natural language is what Frege calls “the form of the assertoric sentence”. So construed, truth is neither an object nor a property but something else that belongs to a third logical category to which also the logical relations such as the “falling” of an object under a concept (subsumption) and the “stand- ing” of objects in a relation belong. I do not deny that Frege conceived of the truth-values as objects; my point rather is that this does not also hold for truth, considered as what is expressed by the form of the assertoric sentence. Th e paper is structured as follows. In section 1, I briefl y describe Frege’s system of logical categories. Th e task of section 2 is to show that, given the special role that Frege ascribes to the concept of truth in judgment and assertion, truth can neither be an object nor a concept. In section 3, it is argued that the naming theory of truth cannot be attributed to Frege. 126.
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