Reevaluating the Ontological Status of Fregean Gedenken: A Social-Constructivist Perspective

Abstract

Frege takes thoughts to be Platonic entities existing independently of individual minds inhabiting a non-spatiotemporal third realm, whose mode of presentation truthfully describes how things are. This paper argues that the ontological status of Fregean thoughts cannot be veridically objective in the sense that. This paper will first give an account of Frege’s thoughts and how he took thoughts to be objective. Then it will propose a liar’s paradox, given Frege’s commitments on thoughts that have truth values and the law of excluded middle, to challenge his conception of thoughts. Next, it will suggest a social-constructivist interpretation of the thought being intersubjective, which conceptually supports his system of logic while avoiding the paradox inherent in Frege’s Platonist framework. From the perspective of intersubjectivity, Fregean thought can be interpreted as a way to circumvent the self-referential paradox, a feat accomplished by eschewing the bivalence. The liar’s paradox cannot be established if thoughts are conceived of as socially constructed, intersubjective entities.