[Inquiry] Re: Sign Relations -- Discussion

[Jon Awbrey]

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SR.  Discussion Note 8

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JA = Jon Awbrey
KM = Kirsti Määttänen

Re: SR-COM 12.  http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-January/002259.html
In: SR-COM.     http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/2005-January/thread.html#2242

JA: Now this is very pretty, and some people get so enamored of it that 
    they would even say you can now do away with the objects themselves, 
    having "explained them away" or "reconstructed" them as equivalence 
    classes of syntactic entities.  Some folks read Frege this way, for 
    instance. 

KM: Who are the "some folks" who read Frege this way?

JA: I had in mind Dummett's account of Tugendhat's approach
    to Frege's theory of reference, found on pp. 199-203 of
    Michael Dummett, 'Frege:  Philosophy of Language', 2nd,
    Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 1981.

Two excerpts:

| An attempt has recently been made by Tugendhat [E. Tugendhat, in M. Schirn (ed.),
| 'Studien zu Frege / Studies on Frege', vol. 3, Stuttgart and Bad Canstatt, 1976,
| pp. 51-69] to approach Frege's notion of reference from a new direction.  This
| involves, in effect, casting off the use of the name/bearer relation as prototype,
| and presenting reference wholly as semantic role.  It is instructive to study the
| results of this attempt.
|
| Tugendhat proposes that reference should be understood as what he calls
| "truth-value potential".  The truth-value potential of an expression is,
| in effect, its semantic role, its contribution to the determination of the
| truth-value of a sentence in which it occurs.  Tugendhat does not explain
| this notion so much by apppeal to the semantics which are to be given for
| the language, a semantics which will lay down what the semantic role of
| each primitive expression is:  rather, what he actually defines is the
| relation between two expressions of having the same truth-value potential,
| in terms of the truth-values, assumed as already known, of the sentences
| in which they occur.  Two expressions will then be said to have the same
| truth-value potential just in case, whenever each is supplemented by the
| same expression to form a sentence, the two resulting sentences have the
| same truth-value.  Tugendhat does not say what truth-value potential
| itself is:  it could, in accordance with a device introduced by Frege,
| and compatibly with all that Tugendhat says, be identified with an
| equivalence class of expressions under the equivalence relation
| of having the same truth-value potential.  (Dummett, p. 199).

| Tugendhat has stripped the notion of reference of the character of being
| a 'relation' to something extra-linguistic:  it has become, in his hands,
| essentially an equivalence relation between expressions.  (Dummett, p. 200).

Dummett then goes on to criticize the consequences of this interpretation.

Jon Awbrey

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inquiry e-lab: http://stderr.org/pipermail/inquiry/
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