Why is Frege's judgment stroke superfluous?

Martin Gustafsson

pp. 87-99

in: Gisela Bengtsson, Simo Säätelä, Alois Pichler (eds), New essays on Frege, Berlin, Springer, 2018

Abstract

Frege's use of a judgment stroke in his conceptual notation has been a matter of controversy, at least since Wittgenstein rejected it as "logically quite meaningless' in the Tractatus. Recent defenders of Frege include Tyler Burge, Nicolas Smith and Wolfgang Künne, whereas critics include William Taschek and Edward Kanterian. Against the background of these defenses and criticisms, the present paper argues that Frege faces a dilemma the two horns of which are related to his early and later conceptions of asserted content respectively. On the one hand, if content is thought of as something that has propositional structure, then the judgment stroke is superfluous. On the other hand, if what is to the right of the judgment stroke is conceived as a sort of name designating a truth-value, then there is no consistent way to avoid construing the judgment stroke as a kind of predicate, and thereby fail to do justice to the act-character of judgment and assertion.

Cited authors

Kant Immanuel

Frege Gottlob

Wittgenstein Ludwig

Künne Wolfgang

Burge Tyler

Kanterian Edward