This is of course an analytic philosophy. Last time I gave you this wild overview of the entire history of philosophy. And by the end, you might think, wow, we've got this very, very strange idea of what philosophy is all about.
Because it turned out that starting from fairly simple thoughts about what it is to think about something ended up leading to this conclusion that the world consists of one mind and that everything is mental. Okay, and that seems at first glance preposterous, right? Somebody says, okay, basic question of philosophy, metaphysics, what there is, what is there? The world mind.
That's like bizarre, right? At least I hope you think that's bizarre. And so, how did we get there?
And what is analytic philosophy as, in part at least, a reaction against this sort of view? Well, it is a course in analytic philosophy. And so the first thing to ask is what on earth is that?
If you look for definitions, especially at an early stage, you find things that are tied to very specific modes of philosophical thinking, specific philosophies. philosophical theses. And almost all of those were abandoned by around 1950. And so on one picture of analytic philosophy, it was born in the works of Frege and Russell, and it died in 1950. And really now, those of us who think of our of ourselves as continuing the tradition of analytic philosophy, are doing something else.
So, I think it's a mistake to tie this to any specific philosophical thesis. This isn't just the view of Russell or of Frege, or of the logical empiricists or other types of things. It's something new.
So, let me just start by asking you, since you signed up for this course, you must have some idea of what the analytic tradition is all about. What is analytic philosophy? Yeah, I always thought about that as like just asking like what should I do or like what is, you know, like what is there out there or, you know, how many different, how many different... ways can I think about what I am, stuff like that. Like kind of the Descartes kind of arm shaker philosophy type, like you just sit there and think sort of.
OK. All right, good. Now part of it is then, this is philosophy, right? So it does connect to basic questions of metaphysics, like what is there?
And basic questions of epistemology, like how do I know? And basic questions of ethics, like what do I do? And so that's the philosophy part in a sense.
We've already been talking about that and it is a form of philosophy. Now by the way it's important to say that because a lot of people thought in the initial stages of analytic philosophy that it was really a rebellion against philosophy. itself.
And so it was an attempt to replace philosophy with linguistic analysis, roughly linguistics or something else like that. That's certainly not the way contemporary and lived philosophers think about what they're doing. And if you look at the history, these people are concerned with with questions like what is there, how do I know, and what do I do? And so it is a kind of philosophy. It is not an anti-philosophy in the way that some of its practitioners have held.
Now, it is important to recognize there will be a strain that we encounter that really is like that. Rudolf Carnap in his early work really does think philosophy is just full suit of problems. And Wittgenstein thinks the same thing.
That in the end, once you get clear about everything, all the philosophical questions go away. And so we will see some people who think. What is there? How do I know?
What do I do? Give me a break. There's no way to answer these questions. In fact, these questions don't even have any real sense.
But that's surely not the mainstream. That's one particular variant. So I think it is fair to say it is a kind of philosophy. But now, what does the analytic contribute? It seemed like it was kind of sidesweeping all the really abstract philosophy and focusing on empiricism and you were saying linguistics and the structure of what we know.
Yeah. Ah, good, okay. Yes, the analytic part is going to be connected to some sort of methodology. And you've mentioned a couple of key elements.
One is, some analytic philosophers are empiricists, and indeed the early stages were empiricists through and through. So a lot of people think of analytic philosophy as a kind of empiricism. On the other hand, there are, on the contemporary scene, lots of people who fall under analytic philosophy who are not empiricists.
But let's just say... there's a great deal of attention to empirical methods. Whether in the end you think that's the full story or not, yes, there is a great concern with, for example, philosophy of science.
And also with language, as you pointed out. A great concern with linguistic structure. Indeed, a lot of analytic philosophers have held the thesis that all philosophical questions are in the end questions of language.
Wittgenstein, again, a good example. And so, there are, whether you think that or not, There's at least a methodology that takes language very seriously, that takes empirical science very seriously. What else?
Is there anything else you can say about it? Yeah. I always understood analytic philosophy as mostly differing stylistically.
continental philosophy so continental philosophy writing in a way that's more literary, opaque, stylistic, analytic philosophy trying to lay out very clear proofs of things. Ah good there is a definite difference in methodology and you can call it style if you want but yes clarity is a supreme virtue in fact in this respect continental philosophy and by that I don't mean what everybody's doing in Europe I really mean specifically a certain strain of French German philosophy has other values. Clarity is not usually high on the list. That's not to say there aren't other virtues.
There is a strong literary sense to a lot of people working in continental philosophy. There is an attempt to try to, how can I say it, connect things with a lot of other things. Broadly speaking, the methodology of continental thinkers in that tradition is holistic. Analytic philosophers tend, with a few exceptions, perceptions not to be primarily holistic. The goal is not to just draw connections to lots and lots of other things, it's to break down things.
And indeed if you think about what this term really means, where it comes from, analytic comes from analysis. And what is analysis? What do you do when you analyze?
Yeah, you could take it apart in the smaller problems. Exactly, exactly. Descartes in his work on method, the discourse on method, actually talks about the analytic method. And what does he mean?
He means breaking things down. parts. Understanding holes in terms of parts.
So there's going to be an attempt to analyze things, to use analysis as a method, and that means understanding holes in terms of parts. Now again, that's not something that in the end every analytic philosopher is going to adhere to. We will see, especially in the 1950s and later, a movement toward a kind of wholesome.
But it begins with that attempt. And even once you get down to the... thinkers who in some sense defend a sort of holism, their methodology is still analytic in feel. The style is very much one of analysis, even if in some sense they deny the thesis that holes are always to be understood in terms of partisan.
sometimes they'll think it goes the other direction but that doesn't mean they abandon the entire sort of method and approach that takes that as critical so think about what Descartes does when he defines analytic geometry for example, he's breaking things down into parts and actually what is he doing? He's taking geometry and giving you an arithmetical model of it, he's identifying points with ordered pairs for example in a plane and he talks about line in terms of an equation and so there is is a sense in which we're talking about holes in terms of parts and also a sense, I think it's fair to say, in which we're interested in constructing models of things where we say, all right, here's a way of trying to understand blah, blah, blah. What if we had a model of it that looked like this? Now, to some extent, I think that's what we do when we try to understand anything.
But in analytic philosophy, you'll often, especially in later stages of analytic philosophy, find people doing precisely that. You want to understand this language. Let me give you a model and often it's a logical model or a mathematical model though. Not always sometimes.
There'll be a different kind of model Well, it's like this Now that tendency goes back. In fact, all of these go back a long way Analytic philosophy is something that usually is thought of as beginning with Frege but Actually, if we think in terms of breaking down holes in terms of parts stressing language and clarity stressing empirical methods developing models of things you can find echoes of this throughout the entire history of philosophy. I mean, in retrospect, who are some philosophers you might think of as analytic in spirit, even long before the 20th century?
Yeah, Aristotle. Good. So there are going to be certain heroes here.
And if we think just of identifying heroes, well, Aristotle is going to be one of them. A model of empirical investigation, logical analysis, clarity, analyzing holes in terms of parts, and so on. So Aristotle will be one of the philosophical heroes.
Who else? Yeah, all the social contract theorists trying to figure out... How government works and the pieces that people work on that. Okay, good, good.
Yes, especially in ethics and political philosophy, contract theory. And so you're going to find a variety of people there. Hobbes, Locke, He. He ends up being a very important hero for all sorts of reasons, not just politically and morally.
He seems to break holes down in terms of parts, as does Locke, right? Think about complex ideas as resolving into ultimately simple ideas. The idea of analyzing the complex set of the simple is something you find in the empiricists and inspires analytic philosophers.
In fact, for a long time, He is really the chief hero of the analytic philosophers. And then, let's see, who else might be? Yeah, Dick Batman, like... Okay, good.
Descartes, partly because he does identify that method, and also Leibniz. Why Leibniz? He's an interesting case.
I think you're totally right. But what is it about Leibniz that would appeal to somebody having this sort of approach? Does anybody here know enough Leibniz to... I mean, one thing is, Leibniz, I mean, he's the co-inventor of the calculus, right? So, he's clearly somebody interested in modeling and mathematical analysis and that sort of thing.
He's also a logician. He develops... kind of complicated logic of concepts that's actually extremely interesting.
So there are a variety of things like that about Leibniz, but also what is he doing? He's breaking things down into parts. Leibniz never really produced a massive philosophical work. you have to read sort of small chunks and often his views vary among those which is why it took a long time for Leibniz to be really recognized as a major philosopher but guess who the first person was to really write a book on the philosophy of Leibniz and to see him as somebody who's a progenitor of this Bertrand Russell and so Russell took Leibniz as one of his main heroes partly as a logician but partly as a philosopher who's breaking down holes into parts and indeed in one of his works called the model monadology, the whole world resolves into these basic elements that are windowless monads that reflect every other monad.
And so imagine the world as this complicated network of these little windowless atoms, as it were. And that atomism, you find in Leibniz, inspired Russell and many other analytic philosophers. Okay, good.
Well, that's something of a picture. And by the way, once you see this, you can start seeing it in all sorts of other people too. And you tell me. utilitarians like Bentham and Mill, for example. In fact, in one of his essays, Bentham talks about the analytic method, and Mill considers that one of his main contributions. So, we can really start adding lots of other people here if we keep going on.
But now, I want to think some about the thought of Gottlob Frege. One time, by the way, a student came into my office and said, I'm really interested in the philosophy of Frege. And I said, who?
I've never heard of this guy. He said, well, he's this guy, and eventually I was, oh, you mean Frege, okay? There are certain... terms and especially names in philosophy that you have to pronounce correctly or you sound dumb okay like descartes um i've had students who say well you know descartes um that That makes you sound stupid.
And I understand it if you've just read it and you've never heard it, but one thing that's important is learn how to pronounce it correctly. The students who amaze me are the ones who all semester long will hear me talk about Descartes, or in this case, Frege, and at the end still say Frege or Descartes. So don't be one of those students. I never understand it.
They evidently think I'm wrong, that I just have this strange verbal tick. Well, in any case, who is Frege? Frege was born... Born in 1848, the year of the great revolutions, he died in 1925. He was a German mathematician, logician, and philosopher. Primarily known during his life for his mathematical work, which was very important in itself.
From our point of view, since we're not really going to focus much on the philosophy of mathematics here, we're going to look at other aspects of his thought. We'll have to start with some idea of his approach to logic. Because in he did something quite dramatic.
Published a work known as the Griff Shrift. Which means well, a griff is concept or conception. It's often rendered in the translation where we can't. And Shrift writing. So it's a system of concept writing.
And really what it is in contemporary terms is the first example of first order logic. Now as it happens, that very same year, 1879, Charles Sanders Peirce also published. system of logic in which he defines more or less the same thing. They're pretty much equivalent.
And today, they're just considered classical for store-of-law. But the way in which we formalize them... is very different from the way that Frege or Peirce did then. It was really Giuseppe Piano and Bertrand Russell that put logic in the form that it's more or less what we have today.
In any case, this is important because it really develops a new logical language. There are times in the history of philosophy where people suddenly have a new conceptual framework within which to cast philosophical problems. And Frege's discovery... of first order logic. It was one of those.
Think about Aristotle and his contribution to logic. Aristotle, by the way, with many other works, starts with the opinions of other people. In the metaphysics, he says, for example, the first thing to do is examine the common opinions.
See what they say before you start reflecting on this. Examine the common opinions as well as the opinions of the wise. In logic, he says, actually I had no one to consider because there was nobody before you who did any of this. So he really invented of logic and in some ways you can see a great deal of philosophy is just springing from that conceptual development.
Something similar happens with Frege. It revolutionizes philosophy partly because it gives you a new way of thinking about philosophical questions. So to some extent this is, if you've taken any logic now it's easy to think, oh this is classical first-order logic and you read those parts of Frege and think, wow this is a really awkward way of saying something that's now... cliche, but it was happening the first time. So, to think of it as cliche is a bit like looking at Shakespeare and saying, I don't like Shakespeare much, there are all these cliches.
He's the one who comes up with them in the first place. Now, it is an awkward notation. He has all these little things that look like this and so on.
It's very notationally painful. However, it does give an important frame. There are a couple of aspects of it that we need to think about because as soon as we get into on sense and denotation or on sense and reference, we see this in a sense as the background. So actually maybe we should develop an alphabet.
Let's start with this article on sense and reference, in German Sinn und Beleugnung, and let's see how it goes. Very first sentence, identity. And by the way, you might think first sentences of important philosophical papers, important philosophical books are often big and an explosive like, gosh, what are some examples of great first lines in philosophy? Actually, this was a Jeopardy category one time. Famous first lines.
So I'll give you a few Jeopardy questions. All men by nature desire to know. Metaphysics.
Good, Aristotle's Metaphysics. Every art, every action, every inquiry is aimed at some good. Ethics.
Good, the Nicomachean Ethics. Let's see. Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in chains. Social contract, good. Here we get identity gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer.
It's a little less dramatic, right? And often analytic philosophy is like that. with a problem. It does not begin with grand sweeping statements.
It does not begin with the kind of thing that too many students write at the beginning. Oh people have thought about identity for centuries. No, it gets right to the point. Okay, identity gives rise to certain questions and he immediately starts out with a puzzle. Is it a relation?
A relation between objects or between names or signs of objects? In my first shrift, I assume the latter. The reasons which seem to favor this are the following. Now, A equals A and A equals B are obviously statements of different cognitive value. So we begin with something that's often referred to as Frege's puzzle.
Actually, there are two puzzles here, I think, but... Let's start with the first puzzle. A equals A, and A equals B seem really different, right? As he puts it, they differ in cognitive value.
And so they, now what, in what way? Well, he goes on to explain. He says A equals A holds a priori, and according to Kant, is to be labeled analytic.
While statements of the form A equals B often contain very valuable extensions of our knowledge. So this is something that looks a priori. a priori, you don't need experience to know whether A is A.
It just is, right? Even if you don't know what A is. Also, it appears to be analytic.
If you just understand the meaning of the identity term, you know that it's true. What else might you say about just A equals A? In less fancy philosophical terms. Suppose somebody said, who really is Donald Trump? And I say, he's Donald Trump.
Actually, in his case, that might be a good answer. But that, actually, my saying that, right, indicates, okay, there's kind of uniqueness here, right? I can't talk about that in terms of anything else. And here you might think, look, yeah, let's put it, it's obvious, right? It is uninformed ordinarily.
Who's the professor in that course? Oh, the professor. Yeah, thanks a lot. It's a bit like John Locke. He's talking about trifling propositions at one point.
He says, ah, what is a soul? Suppose the answer is a soul is a soul. That tells me nothing, right? Or someone's saying doing a chemical investigation, lead, what is lead?
The answer is it's lead. Right? That tells me nothing. But A equals B is quite different. It doesn't seem to be a priori, at least in many cases, I mean it might be.
mathematics. It doesn't look analytic in a lot of cases. It's often unobvious. And so in short, this is something that is often informative. Now what are some examples of informative identity statements?
You learn something by finding out that A is B. Bruce Wayne is Batman. Good! Bruce Wayne is Batman. That's an informative statement.
If you don't know who Batman is, and indeed most of the people in that universe don't, then there's an important bit of information you're missing. And if somebody reveals to you that Bruce Wayne is Batman, that's hardly a priori or analytic or obvious. It's highly informative. Other examples of this sort of identity statement, or you've learned something from it.
Water is H2O. Good. Water is H2O.
That's something that seems to convey a great deal of important scientific information. Other examples? 2 plus 2 equals 4. Good. 2 plus 2 equals 4. that conveys important information. Now, that's one that might be a priori, it might be analytic depending on our theory of mathematics.
In fact, Frege in the end defends the claim that it is both of those things. But it isn't necessarily obvious and it isn't uninformative. Now, we take it for granted because it's an elementary bit of mathematics, but if we made this much more complicated, it would look highly informative.
So, that's something that is a good example of this. Much of arithmetic and the rest of mathematics consists of such identities. these statements. Can you think of other examples?
Well let's take the one that appears, so far you've got sort of names or mass terms or this type of thing. An example he considers is the morning star is the evening star. You see that star in the morning, and later it appears in the evening, it's the same thing. The planet Venus, in the example he's considering.
And it's an astronomical discovery to realize that the thing you see in the heavens in the morning is the same as the thing you're seeing in the heavens in the evening. It's the same, well, plant really, not star at all. So we go on and on. But now, why is this important?
Well, here's what is bothering me. Here's a picture of how we understand these things. things according to which it's hard to understand how these can be informative and how things involving Bruce Wayne and things involving Batman can actually therefore have a different cognitive value.
So let's think about well actually let's look at the way he lays it out. The discovery that the rising Sun is not new every moment but always the same was a very great consequence to astronomy. Even today the identification of a small planet or a comet is not always a matter of course. Now, if we were to regard identity as a relation between that which the names A and B designate, it would seem that A equals B could not differ from A equals A, provided that A equals B is true. A relation would thereby be expressed of a thing to itself, and indeed one in which each thing stands to itself but no other thing.
What is intended to be said by A equals B seems to be that the signs or names A equals B designate the same thing, so those signs themselves would be under discussion. So in short, we've got this. this problem. Suppose you've got something like, oh, well, Batman.
And here we've got the name, Batman. And now we've got, well, Batman, right? Ooh, can I draw?
That's just awful. Gosh, well you know what I mean. Here we've got...
I'll draw another one of my stick figures. Well, he... Hmm... Oh, gosh, that's much worse.
If my art teachers could see me now. Okay, so we've got now actual Batman here. And so the problem becomes really this.
If we're talking about, well, we can do the same thing with Bruce Wayne, right? Here's the name, Bruce Wayne. But now, who does it refer to?
Well, the same guy. And so, if we're talking about identity as a relation between a thing and itself, it looks like, well, really, in the end, it's just saying that guy is that guy. And then it's hard to see how it can be informed.
If I say, hey, that guy is that guy. So it's. they're walking to class and there's somebody just outside the classroom who's passed out, unconscious, just lying there. Psychologists occasionally do this experiment. They have somebody at class change time fall down and collapse.
And nobody stops. It's very depressing about human nature. But anyway, this guy collapses.
Just lie there. We say, who is that guy? If you just say, he is who he is.
He is self identical like all other objects of the universe. We're not learning anything, right? So if we stay at this level, it's very hard to see how this could be informative.
Well, if we think though that we're talking about the names, then actually there's something different and on going on. Suppose we say, well, really what we're talking about in the identity statement are the names. we're saying that Bruce Wayne and Batman are co-referential.
They refer to the same thing. And so it can be informative to know that Bruce Wayne, the name, is co-referential with Batman, that water is co-referential with H2O, etc. Even though it's not informative to be told that Bruce Wayne is co-referential with Bruce Wayne, right?
Of course it is. But now, what would be wrong then with saying this is really about the names? That's what he says in the Berkshire. But how is that as a theory?
Does that work? Is there a problem with saying identity statements are really about the names? What do you mean?
Well, suppose we translate these and we say, aha, Bruce Wayne equals Batman. That's really a way of saying the name Bruce Wayne and the name Batman refer to the same thing. And the same is true here, right? Water is H2O. We say that and so on and so forth.
Is there any way in which that will be a problem? Well, obviously the names in themselves, I mean not what they signify, but the actual little names are not the same because in one plane we perceive them differently. So in that case, they're not the same. Right.
Okay, good. Notice we can't... You can't say, ah, this is saying the name Bruce Wayne is the name Batman.
It's not, right? Those are different linguistic expressions. Similarly, the name or the mass term water is not the same as the mass term H2O.
And so they're different terms, which is why... we have to not only think, gosh, Bruce Wayne here doesn't, you know, we're not talking about the person, we're talking about the name, that means identity has to become something different, right? We have to interpret the identity statement here as meaning our co-referential, refer to the same thing. And so already you notice, wait, we're having to do something weird here. We're saying Bruce Wayne refers to that guy, right?
Oh, except when we're talking about identity. And then all of a sudden the name Bruce Wayne sort of, well, it's funny. ...functions in this statement as if, as if we're naming itself or something like that.
Yeah? Isn't Bruce Wayne equaling Batman? Isn't this particular puzzle different from water equals H2O because water... is necessarily H2O, whereas Bruce Wayne isn't necessarily.
That there could be other Bruce Wayne, there could be other Batman. Ooh, good, good, good. Yeah, yeah, we can ask.
And indeed, Kripke, in naming a necessity, says... I'm going to be talking about the connection between naming and necessity. I hope you see that there is some connection. And a lot of people in his audience at the time would not have seen that there's any such connection. But good, you're raising an important question here.
It's not just that water is H2O. We think, or let me put it this way. It's not just that water happens to be H2O, right, in this world.
We really have a sense, no, that's what water really is, right? It's somehow expressing its identity in a way that suggests this is a necessary truth. So.
2 plus 2 is 4. It's not like, well the way we do arithmetic 2 plus 2 just happens before. You know, that's an oddity of Texas, Simon. In Oklahoma it's different. No, it's really necessarily true. But now the morning star is the evening star.
That doesn't feel the same way, right? Why not? Yeah?
I guess it's just kind of figuring out what the correspondence is. Like we're talking about identity, like what makes up the components of the identity. like the looser the correspondence, sometimes the smaller the connecting unit between the two.
Okay, now I agree with you. There's something looser about the correspondence. What's looser about it? Well, I guess there's like a much larger body of information, like evidential, kind of like to gather to come up with that.
Oh, well, part of it is, yes. To see. This, of course, think about this. There's a big body of information lying behind that, too. It's not always been known.
I guess it's been known since about 1750 that water is H2O. But before that, you might think, you know, this was unknown. And there was a huge amount of chemical information that had to be accumulated. So if we start thinking in terms of bodies of evidence, similarly, what would you have to know to realize Bruce Wayne is Batman?
Maybe there's a lot of stuff. So I agree with you, that's one difference, but we should be careful about thinking that's the essential one. Yeah?
The difference is that we can easily imagine another world where it's not the case. Ooh, good, yes. So in a way, here's the connection. The more complicated the evidentiary basis for this would be, the easier it is, you might think, to imagine that it comes out differently.
And so we can think, yes. the morning star. Could we envision a world where the morning star is not the evening star?
Sure, let's say where it just is a matter of the planetary geometry. In the morning, it's always Venus. In the evening, it's always Saturn or something like that.
In that case, the morning star would not be the same as the evening star. Can we imagine a world where Bruce Wayne is not Batman? Sure, it's a world where Bruce Wayne, you know, let's say meets with a terrible business misfortune, loses all his money, and is now barely scraping by. driving a bus in Gotham City and maybe there is no Batman, or maybe Batman, that role gets taken over by somebody else. And so these don't seem necessary and these do.
So there can be contingent identity statements. Yeah. What about, is this an identity statement saying something like, why don't you like country music? Because I don't like it. That the reason is.
Can the reason you don't, I'm not saying this is a tell-all example, but would that be a similar statement to the morning star is the evening star? Like, I don't like something, the reason I don't like it is because I simply do not like it. Well, yeah, that's an interesting question.
Talk of reasons is tricky and something philosophers have only been investigating in the past, say, 12 years. level years. It's remarkable that's true actually given the importance of the notion but there is no received logic of reason. Like it's a matter that there's a reason waters age duo? Well yeah here's the sense in which I guess you could say there's something similar going on.
If you say why don't I like country music I just don't like it. The reason is I don't like it. I mean what I'm in effect saying from one point of view is look I can't give you a reason for that there's no disputed taste.
etc. But I might think certain reasons are just self-justifying, in much the way that people have thought something like A is A, is self-justifying, self-evident. Why is A equal A?
There was a geometry class I took in high school where there was a student who just, no matter what the teacher would say, Coach Jones was a geometry teacher, he was a track coach by day, well, a geometry teacher from 11 to 11.45. And he would try to explain something and no matter what he said, this person would say, Why? But A is equal to B.
B is equal to C. So A is equal to C. Why?
You know at a certain point if somebody says and well look A is equal to A right? Why? You might just say it's because it is And so yeah, there is this sense in which there's something loopy something, you know a Relation something holds to itself. That's why I don't think A equals B is necessarily informative though Because those loopy ways of thinking aren't that informative well Okay, good. It might not be.
So we were thinking of informative examples of A equals B where there are different things on the two sides, but there might be some that are not very informative. Can you think of some examples? I'm sorry, mine's informative.
Oh, we'll give you an informative one. Let me say, in a hypothetical where we didn't change the types of meals that we eat throughout the day, breakfast would be the same thing as dinner. Because the morning star versus the evening star, it's the same object, but it's in a different time and space for the observer. You know?
So it seems like it's kind of a necessary difference for us, at least. Oh, okay, right. Yeah, notice the morning star, that's the star that appears to us in the morning. Evening star, star that appears to us in the evening.
There's a different relation to the observer. And you might think the same thing is true of this sort of thing. You know, you relate to that person in one way, by way of the description or the name, Bruce Wayne, and a different way as Batman. This is closely related. related to what Frank later refers to as modes of presentation of these objects.
The modes of presentation are different, even though in a sense it's the same object. Yeah. I guess by going off that, I see the difference with all of these is there's a different association with each part of the equal sign. Right. With Bruce Wayne, I associate that with the billionaire and Batman as a superhero.
Two plus two equals four is like parts versus a whole. So I don't know, it just seems like in the same thing with A equals B, it seems like you- kind of associate them with two different things. Right, okay good. So in these cases we do have some differences.
We obviously have different linguistic expressions, but we also have different relations you might say to the object. We have different, well, modes of presentation as Frege puts it. We have different associations. Because indeed, I think Morningstar, ah, see it at dawn, right?
Morningstar, see it in the evening. Or I think Batman, that, Crime Fighter, it was a cape and so on, a cool car. And Bruce Wayne, that guy living in the mansion. And so there are different images I have.
Well, at this point, let's do a little bit of backing up and seeing what Frege wants to say. to do to try to contribute to a solution to this problem. I think once we do that, it will be clearer why he goes the way he does.
I want to start with a traditional idea of what's going on with language and its relation to the world. So think of this as sort of a word to mind to world picture. There is an account something like this developed in Aristotle in the De Anima, and there is an account in Aquinas. It's found later in Locke.
It is, if you want to think of it this way, the common currency of philosophers, more or less all the way from Aristotle. Aristotle through luck and even beyond. And Frank is doing something important. So here is how it appears in Aquinas. According to the philosopher that is Aristotle, words in his Latin Voces are signs of ideas, and ideas the likenesses of things.
Evidently, words refer to things signified through the medium of an intellectual conception. There is something similar. What really, I guess what I want to say is this passage can be read in two ways.
Either he's talking about words referring to things, or he's talking about sentences referring to, well, want. But the voces, that's just sort of things said. And so...
it can refer to sentences as well as words or signs of ideas, ideas the likenesses of things, but rarum is used in Latin for both objects and also states of affairs. So there are different ways of reading this. But in any case, here's the way you might think of it. Remember our little picture of the...
triangle. So let's take this as the object, the triangle. And now I'm going to forget the actual body and just go with the mind here. Here's this mind, and the mind has a thought about the object. And then that thought is like, ah, that's a triangle.
And so there's a concept, we might say, that is involved in that thought. Let's call this the concept of triangle. And the person says, triangle.
Let's start with them actually doing this purely at the level of words. They're not even articulating a sentence at this point. They're saying a triangle.
Well, what is the position here? Aquinas is basically saying, okay, the word there, triangle. Let's put it in fact this way, in quotes, in the game. We're talking about the word there. That's a sign of an idea.
So, we could say that signifies... this concept or idea, as it's expressed here or in Locke, let's say, really take heart, the whole new way of ideas comes from that. And then what?
Well, ideas are the likenesses of things. So this is somehow connected to that. He says it's a likeness, in some sense, of the object.
Yeah. I was on a plane recently, and I was thinking about how there are certain things you can't say in the airport, or you can't say on planes. you know, bomb, you know, explosive, I don't know, they're just, you probably couldn't yell, allahu, whatever, you couldn't yell things.
I mean, you can't scare people, right? Yeah, my brother, when he was a little kid in the 60s, did this. They were, we were going to fly to Pittsburgh to visit my relatives, and they start, you know, and there was something that was setting off the machine, and they start going over him with a wand, saying, step over here, we're going to search you. And he's younger.
I don't know how old he was exactly. He says, what, do you think I have a machine gun? And all of a sudden, he says he has a machine gun!
He's taken off by the FBI. We miss our flight. He probably is still an FBI record.
You know, possible terrorist suspect. Anyway, so if you can't say bomb, or they don't say crash, they'll say emergency water landing. Oh, yeah, yeah. So emergency water landing can't be a good thing.
I mean, that's a crash. We all know we're... probably crashing.
Ah, okay, good. Good, yes. There is something here that Frege is concerned to point out, and that people within the tradition did recognize, which is that these concepts come with all an entanglement with a variety of other things, including other words, but also feelings.
Okay? So there is an emotive aura. Now, in the case of triangle, if I just say triangle, you're unlikely to have any emotional response.
But if I say crash, or terrorist, or a machine gun or something, you do have an emotional response, right? And so I'm going to draw this as a spooky little aura around this thing. Let's say that's not really part of the concept. This is something that's sometimes been called the tone.
The connotation in some people's usage means this. But you're right. There's going to be, in Frege's thought, and really throughout much of the 20th century, the idea that we can somehow separate out the concept of what's really being said from this.
this emotional language. And a huge amount of euphemism is a matter of talking about the same thing and having basically the same concept with a different tone. Continental breakfast means fruit or cereal or whatever.
Yeah, exactly. It means nothing healthy or worthwhile. Yeah, exactly.
What are some other examples of things like that? I mean, it's obvious in political discourse and so forth, but what about just ordinary life? There are euphemisms like that all the time. Yeah?
Like, passed away versus died? Good, passed away versus died. Yeah, I mean, died seems harsher than passed away.
Oh, there's a lot of stuff like, I'm 90 years young. Oh, yes, right. me a break.
That one really bothers me because actually I think it emphasizes the old part, right? You're trying to do it to make it less, you know, oh, you're only 90 years young. If I were 90 years old, I'd be thinking, oh, what a jackass. You don't only think I'm old, you think I'm so old that you have to give me a euphemism because it's embarrassing to admit how old I am.
So yeah, I would really like that. A lot of medical language, PTSD, shell shock. Oh, good, yes, exactly. Exactly, in fact, yeah.
It used to be a thing, I kissed you last semester, shell shock, meaning shells, it has a visceral image when you hear it. He has shell shock, versus PTSD, which sounds like MRSA, or like staph infection or something. Right, right, exactly. Like skin thing, you know. Yes, hospitals are full of this, and some of them convey scientific content, and some of them are really just attempts to get rid of the tone around this.
And it's sort of interesting, because if you live a... as long as I have, you start seeing this change in all sorts of ways, where people euphemize this, and then after a while, that starts taking on these connotations. And so you have to have a euphemism for that, and so on and so forth. It can be kind of crazy after a while. But anyway, yeah, that's an important thing to notice.
Well, here's the idea then. We've got this word, triangle, signifying an idea, a concept. And that concept bears a certain relation to the object. So we could say that, in a sense, triangle is a refers to the object but does it by way of well this idea standing for in fact often this is just in the literature referred to as standing for the concept or the idea and the idea is the thing that bears the primary relation to the object well notice that and Frege stresses this this is something that is inside there right this concept is something inside the mind and therefore it is individual it is subjective it is the sort of thing that I have my idea you have your idea they may or may not be the same yeah is that of the tone or of the thought well both actually So it's, yes, the tone is very, very definitely subjective.
But actually, he says, so is the concept. Suppose, well, for example, I say, what is a triangle? What is your concept of a triangle?
180 degrees. 180 degrees. 180 degrees, that's his concept of a triangle. Three sides.
Three sides. Okay. Three points. Three points. Three points connected by three lines.
Any other concepts of a triangle? Like a triangle angle, three angles. You might worry about, oh, well, I mean a plane figure.
Anyway, you could go, there might be somewhat different conceptions, right? And if you know a lot of geometry, your concept of a triangle might be quite rich. And if you don't, could be pretty sparse. And so, in fact, it might in the end be something like that.
I mean, I couldn't give you a definition of mango. I know what a mango is, I think. I have a concept of a mango.
But if you said, let's say I was talking to a biologist, a botanist, and he said, so, you know all about mangoes. And I said, well, I know they're very good in a smoothie. Really?
And they make a good base for a salsa, surprisingly. But he I don't need that right and he's gonna give me this biological concept of a mango that is not my concept at all I Didn't take high school biology. I could admit it I did it to take two maths at the same time because you can never have enough math. That was my view.
Well anyway That kind of thing even just the cognitive part of it as opposed to the emotive part can vary from person to person and So greatness is well look when we're talking about something like Bruce Wayne's Batman water to 2, etc. I don't want to just say, oh, the concept in your mind is different from that. We're not talking about concepts here.
On the other hand, because we're not talking about something pretty individual, it's not like, ooh, Bruce Wayne is Batman, that just means something different to every person, or 2 plus 2 is 4. No. On the other hand, we can't just talk about the referent either, because then none of them would be informative. So he introduces the concept of a sense.
The sense is something that we can't just talk something that is outside. My mind outside your mind. It is playing the role in Frege's theory that the forms play in Plato's theory.
So if you're over here, you're far away, which is why you're small here. Don't feel bad. But you've got your own concept of a triangle and it has its emotive associations. And you're having this thought and how are you able to actually think the same thought that I think? He says, if we're thinking in terms of ideas or concepts?
You can't. That's something inside my head. And there's actually no way to know whether our concepts are the same because we can't have the same consciousness with both of those concepts.
But we can both connect to the same sense. And so, I need to draw this to your word. You also say triangle. And the sense is something that is like a mode of presentation.
It is something that explains how it is possible for these to be informative, because although Bruce Wayne and Batman have the same referent, they do not have the same sense. water, H2O. They do not have the same sense, even though they do, he says, have the same record. The same thing with 2 plus 2 is 4, morning star, evening star, and so on. We're out of time.
Next time, what we'll do is draw that distinction between sense and reference and concept, and then see how he uses it to solve this puzzle and a variety of other related problems.