Colloquium by James Hutchinson on "Why Does Frege Think We Need To Talk About Language?"

Abstract 

Gottlob Frege says a lot about language.  Many of his claims have struck theorists as insightful contributions to general theories of “the workings of language,” and he sometimes introduces technical notions that have proved fruitful in this sort of general theory. But Frege himself claims to be mainly concerned with “logical” matters, and he claims that these matters are in no way linguistic. The basic question arises: why, then, does Frege make such extensive and (apparently) theoretical linguistic claims? How do they relate to his logical concerns? Some answers to this question have major consequences, not just for understanding Frege’s own work, but also for broad stories we tell about the history of philosophy. (Some answers, for example, place Frege at the head of a “linguistic turn” that would dominate 20th century philosophy.) I argue for a new explanation of why Frege makes these linguistic claims: roughly, his aim is to indirectly make us better at logic by exploiting psychological facts about our relation to language. This puts Frege at odds with much work that takes itself to be inspired by his own.

Friday 10th October 

JF 507 

17:00