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ABSTRACT
Recently, the content/force distinction has had a bad press. It has been argued that the distinction is not properly motivated and that it makes the problem of the unity of the proposition intractable. I will argue that Frege’s version of the content/force distinction is immune from these objections. In order to do so, I will reconstruct his argument that ‘the nature of a question’ requires a distinction between force and content. I will answer the concern about the unity of the proposition by outlining how the distinction can be combined with a Fregean account of the unity of thought.
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 References to the pagination of the German text are in round parentheses.
2 Frege [Citation1892: 221 (39)] suggests that, in addition to thoughts, there are also non-truth-evaluable sentential senses which he calls ‘questions’. These ‘questions’ can be the senses of wh-questions, but not of propositional questions.
3 Indicative sentences with context-dependent expressions, for example, don’t express thoughts. I will set aside complication due to context-dependence because they are orthogonal to my topic.
4 For an overview of the discussion and a defence of Frege’s view, see Smith [Citation2000] and Pedriali [Citation2017].
5 Alternatively, one can run Frege’s argument with ‘I believe so.’
6 Krifka [Citation2014: 50] and van Elswyk [Citation2019] argue that ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ are pro-sentences designating propositions. But van Elswyk (personal communication) uses ‘designate’ and ‘express’ in special technical senses.
7 Formal semanticists model propositions as sets of possible worlds. I assume that the propositions under consideration are structured entities, in order to make this proposal bear on Frege’s view.
8 This is my translation. The original translation has ‘opposite sentences’. Frege himself just has ‘opposites’ (Gegensätze) between which one ‘vacillates’ (schwankt). The opposites can’t be sentences because in a judgment one acknowledges the truth, not of a sentence, but rather of a thought. Further, the opposite thought is not ‘implied’ but is simply present without further ado (von selbst immer da).
9 Frege’s work contains also many passages in which he seems to take thoughts to be unities that are prior to concepts. The thought is not built up from building blocks, but its components are arrived at by decomposing the thought. For discussion, see, for example, Heis [Citation2014].
10 I have changed the translation of ‘Wunschsätze’ and so on from ‘sentences that serve to express a wish’ to ‘optative sentences’, etc. For Frege talks about sentence moods, not uses of sentences. Further, his ‘anerkennen’ should be translated as ‘acknowledge’ and ‘Auffassung’ is not ‘grasping’ (fassen).
11 Frege [Citation1906: 213 (197)] points out that this abstraction principle does not allow us to introduce obviously true thoughts. Like him, I leave this problem for another occasion.
12 I am grateful to audiences in King’s College London and the University of Oslo for helpful feedback. My thanks go to Nick Allott, Julien Dutant, Thomas Hodgson, Giulia Felappi, Øystein Linnebo and Dolf Rami for comments. Many thanks to the anonymous referees of this Journal for constructive criticism.