Penultimate draft of a review which will appear in History and Philosophy of Logic, DOI 10.1080/01445340.2016.1146202 PIERANNA GARAVASO and NICLA VASSALLO, Frege on Thinking and Its Epistemic Significance. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015, viii+128 pp. $75.00. ISBN: 978-0-7391-7838-6 (hardback); ISBN: 978-0-7391-7839- 3 (e-book). Reviewed by CARLO CELLUCCI, Department of Philosophy, Sapienza University of Rome, Via Carlo Fea 2, 00161 Rome, Italy, carlo.cellucci@uniroma1.it Given the large literature on Frege, one might believe that it would be impossible to say anything essentially new on the subject. This book contradicts this belief, calling attention on Frege s interest for thinking as distinguished from thought. Much credit for the quantity and breadth of scholarship on Frege must be given to Dummett s extensive work on the subject, which not only has inspired heated debates and provoked many reactions but, according to the authors, still provides the best developed, encompassing, systematic, and articulated effort to reconstruct Frege s thought. Nevertheless, the term thinking does not appear in the index of Dummett (1973), his major work on Frege. It does not appear either in the indexes of the books of critics of Dummett, such as Sluga (1980) or Currie (1982). The only work which pays attention to Frege s notion of thinking is Carl 1
(1994). The authors declare their indebtedness to Carl s reading of Frege, but point out that their analysis of Frege s notion of thinking goes further than Carl s. It is not surprising that, in the current literature on Frege, there is little or no attention to Frege s interest for thinking as distinguished from thought. For thinking is a mental process, and it is widely held that, because of his antipsychologism, Frege did not consider thinking as a mental process to be philosophically relevant. This, however, does not explain why, as a matter of fact, Frege says so much about thinking both in his earlier writings, such as Begriffsschrift (1879) and On the Scientific Justification of a Concept-script (1882), and in his later works, such as Thoughts (1918-1919) and Sources of Knowledge of Mathematics and the Mathematical Natural Sciences (1924-1925). Alternatively, the authors suggest that the reason why, in the current literature on Frege, there is little or no attention to Frege s interest for thinking is that, while Frege was aware of the distinction between das Denken and der Gedanke, there is no parallel consistent distinction between the English terms thinking and thought. The practice of translating das Denken as thought has greatly diminished the number of passages in which it is apparent that Frege discusses thinking rather than thought, and has given unwarranted support to the claim that he promoted the philosophy of thought in contrast to the philosophy of thinking. What is more important, it has obscured the presence in Frege of a notion of thinking that is not merely psychological in kind. Actually, the authors do not intend to attack the current thought-centered reading of Frege. Nevertheless, they state that this reading is incomplete, because it neglects Frege s many comments on thinking, and thus needs to be integrated by an interpretation of the role of thinking in his philosophical views on logic, knowledge, and language. 2
The authors different reading of Frege brings to light his interest in human knowledge and understanding, and in the crucial epistemic role that language plays in our thinking, that is, in our understanding and grasping of thoughts. It is still correct to say, as Dummett does, that Frege is a philosopher of language, but in a sense different from Dummett s. According to Frege, language plays an important role in thinking because it makes the grasping of thoughts possible, and hence there cannot be any philosophy of thought without a philosophy of thinking based on language. Thus Frege s attention to language is not in alternative to or with the exclusion of any attention to thinking. The book consists of four chapters, after the Introduction which appears as Chapter 1. In Chapter 2, the authors attempt to circumscribe the precise sense in which Frege is an anti-psychologist, focusing on the main versions of antipsychologism usually linked to Frege in the literature, namely, semantic, Platonist, and logical anti-psychologism. The chapter ends with a brief comparison between Frege and Boole, a logician and mathematician widely accused of psychologism, and concludes with a more careful statement of Frege s position on psychologism. The authors argue that both Frege and Boole hold some version of logical psychologism which acknowledges important ties between the laws of logic and actual mental processes. In Chapter 3, the authors develop Frege s notion of thinking in relation to logic, language, and objective entities such as thoughts. They outline two main notions of objectivity in Frege and isolate three kinds of thinking: psychological, logical, and logical-psychological thinking. They examine each kind of thinking and discuss which epistemological role each of them can play within Frege s goal of creating an objective science. Psychological thinking with its linguistic entrapments often leads us astray. On the other hand, there is an ideal type of thinking, reines Denken, the purely logical thinking, which our actual natural processes of thinking ought to follow but sometimes only partially approximate. 3
Logic aims to capture and represent logical thinking, and this thinking guarantees an optimal epistemic condition but unfortunately is not our thinking in practice. For this reason, the laws of thinking are conceived as normative: they show us how perfect minds would think and how we should think, if our goal is to attain the truth. Although, on the one hand, from a purely psychological perspective, our thinking often leads us astray, and, on the other hand, purely logical thinking is not our thinking in practice, the authors point to a third, mixed way of conceiving thinking, the logical-psychological thinking, in which the logical, objective, element is present even when intermingled with the unavoidable psychological component. While the psychological aspect remains subjective and ultimately incommunicable, the logical aspect is knowable. It mediates our apprehension of thoughts and warrants the persistence of their objectivity. It ultimately allows us to share our knowledge of thoughts and of what is external to us, that is, to realize an objective science. In Chapter 4, the authors show that Frege discusses epistemological questions such as scepticism, the sources of knowledge, the definition of propositional knowledge, the theory of justification, and naturalism. Against the view that Frege pays only limited attention to epistemological matters, the authors argue that, because of his attention to these themes, Frege had wide ranging epistemological views. He wrote on epistemological themes in more works than it is usually taken to be the case and throughout his life. These facts alone show that these themes were important to Frege during the whole development of his thought. It is far-fetched to say that a philosopher who addressed so many core epistemological questions was only marginally interested in epistemology. On the contrary, in Frege s work and thought, there is the outline of an articulated and complex epistemology 4
In Chapter 5, the authors focus on the role that Frege believed language plays with regard to das Denken and der Gedanke, respectively. They argue that, in Frege, although the link between language and thoughts is more complex than that between language and thinking, language plays a necessary epistemic role both in expressing thoughts and in directing thinking. According to Frege, there is a kind of thinking that is pure or conceptual and for this kind of thinking Frege devises his conceptual notation. This kind of thinking requires a language and symbols, but these must be unambiguous. Moreover, this language must render perspicuous the formal structure of our inferences. Language and symbols must be sensible since humans need perceivable tools to capture what is not essentially sensible, that is, the thought and the concept. Accordingly, a symbolic language plays an epistemic role in making conceptual thinking possible: by allowing humans to gain internal control over their own ideas, by employing the sensible, that is, symbols and words, to signify the non-sensible, by overcoming the restrictions of geometrical and spatial intuitions and by allowing only the laws of logic to govern pure thinking. Language plays a necessary function also in representing and expressing thoughts in such a way that humans may be able to grasp them. We can only grasp thoughts because the structure of the sentences expressing them reflects the structure of the thoughts they express. Thus language plays a crucial epistemic role with regard to both das Denken and der Gedanke. From this description of the content of the book it is apparent that the book does not discuss Frege s logicist project or his philosophy of language. It may seem somewhat surprising that the authors discuss Frege s views on thinking independently of an analysis of the whole of his logic or his views on sense and reference. This will be particularly surprising for scholars who link Frege s epistemological views exclusively to his logicist concerns. The authors acknowledge that it is difficult to determine whether Frege was first interested in the logicist project and then in thinking or vice versa. They point out, however, 5
that when the logicist project failed because of Russell s discovery of the contradiction in Frege s system, Frege did not abandon his reflections on thinking, but rather continued to develop them with a clearer epistemological focus rather than merely in connection with the foundation of logic and mathematics. This shows that, even if Frege s interest in epistemological issues originally ensued from his logicist project, he was interested in such issues for their own sake. This book is a welcome addition to the literature on Frege. It fills the gap that most secondary literature on Frege has left open by not paying close enough attention to what Frege says about thinking. In this way it shows that, despite the large literature on Frege, it is still possible to say something essentially new on the subject. Acknowledgement I am grateful to Norma Goethe for her comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this review. References Carl, W. 1994. Frege s Theory of Sense and Reference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Currie, G. 1982. Frege: An Introduction to His Philosophy. Brighton: The Harvester Press. Dummett, M. 1973. Frege: Philosophy of Language. London: Duckworth. Sluga, H. 1980. Gottlob Frege. London: Routledge. 6