Blackwell Reference Online

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In English the noun “thought” is ambiguous. It can mean what a person thinks or believes, that is, the contents of acts of thinking or states of beliefs etc., a proposition. But it can also mean an act of thinking or (in a perhaps slightly stretched sense) a state of belief. In this sense, thoughts are psychological. The central question in the literature concerns thought in the latter sense. But Frege is an exception.A classical starting place in discussing the relation among language, thought, and meaning is the philosophy of Gottlob Frege. When we speak of “thoughts” in connection with Frege we mean Gedanken, thoughts in the first sense. They are what are asserted and judged; they are abstract entities. Frege is not concerned with thoughts as psychological states. Michael Dummett (1996] speaks of “the extrusion of thoughts from the mind” in the writings of Bolzano, Frege, and the later Husserl, that is, the disengagement of thoughts from psychological factors, not only perceptions and “ideas” but also from thoughts in the second sense above, however non-empiricist an account of them we may fashion.Frege does not say what constitutes having a thought, as Dummett (1993] notes. This is not surprising if the motivation of Frege's engagement in the logical study of language is not primarily to explain either the psychological basis of linguistic meaning or of having a thought. His ... log in or subscribe to read full text