Gottleb Frege and "The Logical Inquiry of Thought"

A terrible windstorm, lasting all of one day, recently hit the area where my house is located, and it has disabled the electricity from my house for the past week (at the time of this posting). Therefore, my family has decided to stay at my uncle and auntie's house until all gets back to normal. This unfortunate occurrence, like the nature of other unfortunate occurrences, has given me the opportunity to watch the excellent television series, "House," as well as to read an article by Gottleb Frege in preparation for the philosophy of language class I intend to take this upcoming quarter. While I don't intend to provide any concerted criticism of the article, I'll merely provide a description of his views--criticism may follow in later posts.

Frege makes what he takes to be a crucial distinction between the meaning of 'thought' and 'idea.' Proceeding from the classic debate between materialists (empiricists) and idealists, Frege uses the distinction to argue ultimately for the materialist viewpoint. Since I have never seriously written about metaphysics before, let's slowly examine the metaphysical debate from its philosophical roots.

All materialists share the belief that objects exterior to themselves cause their perceptions--through sense experience--of the 'contents of their consciousness.' The presumes that objects exists independently of perception and therefore independently of minds. My perception, which Frege calls 'idea,' of seeing the monitor of a laptop and feeling my fingers type in these words, for instance, is directly caused by the laptop's actually existing.

To those not conditioned to academic philosophy, this materialist principle would appear to be a tautology, which is to say that thinking otherwise would not only be incoherent but also warrant one to arrest the person uttering it into a mental asylum. On further reflection, though, such a reaction is clearly facetious when one considers the possibility of hallucinations, dreams, and matrix worlds. For if we take the previous example into consideration again, we'll notice that it's logically possible (I can conceive of it) that my typing this post may be part of an hallucination I'm experiencing and am presuming as real. The certainty that the laptop exists (in the independent world apart from my mind's thinking it) therefore vanishes. If one responds by saying it's 'probably' true that the laptop independently exists, then one wonders on what basis one can tell whether the something exists independently or not. For it appears as though some objective criterion must be used to distinguish between something existing and something not existing. Yet if the probability is based on experience, then how would I know if all my earlier experience were not similarly illusions. And if the probability is based on reason, then there doesn't appear to be any reason to believe the laptop exists over the reason that it doesn't. To make the point another way, how do I know I'm not stuck in a matrix world. Skepticism about the existence of objects independent of the mind therefore ensues--realism appears to fall into deep trouble.

The alternative to materialism, idealism, was advocated for by philosophers like George Berkeley, Immanuel Kant, and the German idealists (Hegel, Schoepenhauer, Fichte)--although they each defended a different form of idealism. Idealists begin from a position of solipsism, or the idea that all I can know for certain are my own perceptions (experiences)--what I hear, see, taste, smell, and feel. Given that I know I perceive these things for certain, I can then reflect upon the necessary conditions in order for me to have these perceptions. These perceptions, I will notice, presuppose a priori space, time, and causality. For if I had these experiences in the absence of space, there would be no movement of objects of perception since there would be no space in which to move. If there there was no time, there would not be movement either because time (succession of events) is necessary for an object to move from one place to another. The perceiver must also presuppose the concept of causality since one object's moving another is caused by the former object.

Nietzche, in his typical polemical way, attacked Kant and the idealists for supposing that these perceptions and a priori concepts reflect what is in the real world. The world of perception does not necessarily reflect the noumenal world (thing-in-itself). Moreover, he critiqued the whole enterprise of pursuing the truth of the noumenal world altogether. Since we do have these experiences, why do we value knowing the truth about the noumenal world since we would have the same experiences even if we did. Moreover, he thought that all values were ultimately baseless--including the supreme value of truth-seeking--since one would ultimately come to the conclusion that we ourselves created values in the first instance--according to our emotions (what we wanted)--, so we can change them if we wanted. Creativity, then, becomes the chief virtue for human beings: creating something out of nothing. It's a matter of human ingenuity to create values for himself, for Nietzche doesn't give specific prescriptions to what those values should be. Relativism, as opposed to objectivism, takes over the world.

Frege may be best associated with the materialists. He thought thoughts themselves were the link between our mind and the external world. We can all share thoughts about these objects, but we can't share ideas, which are necessarily stuck within our own minds. He undertakes a type of conceptual analysis, trying to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for thoughts and ideas so as to gain knowledge about them and the rest of metaphysics. He supposed that the idea of the self was not itself an idea like all other ideas (ideas about perceptions) but was