Chi se ne Frege?

Or, Who is this Frege?

Gottlob Frege shows that language is not to be trusted. We are always struggling against the constraints of language...

The moment when the ability of language to refer and to mean becomes problematic or interesting, is the moment when the philosophy of language comes alive.

Why is it that when we refer to an object such as a dog or wardrobe, we initially see it as an indeterminate member of a class, rather than an individual. "There is a dog in my yard", or "I need a wardrobe for my suits" refer to the central objects in such a way as to give no clear mental picture of either. It takes a lot of description and qualification to get anywhere near a picture of a specific dog or wardrobe, and we might well feel that in fact we never do.



IEP says :

Propositions are abstract entities; they do not exist in space and time. They are sometimes said to be "timeless", "eternal", or "omnitemporal" entities. Terminology aside, the essential point is that propositions are not concrete (or material) objects. Nor, for that matter, are they mental entities; they are not "thoughts" as Frege had suggested in the nineteenth century. The theory that propositions are the bearers of truth-values also has been criticized. Nominalists object to the abstract character of propositions. Another complaint is that it's not sufficiently clear when we have a case of the same propositions as opposed to similar propositions. This is much like the complaint that we can't determine when two sentences have exactly the same meaning. The relationship between sentences and propositions is a serious philosophical problem.