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Frege's Contribution to Philosophy of Language

Frege's Contribution to Philosophy of Language. Richard G. Heck and Robert May. Forthcoming in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Language, edited by E. Lepore and B. Smith.

An investigation of Frege's various contributions to the study of language, focusing on three of his most famous doctrines: that concepts are unsaturated, that sentences refer to truth-values, and that sense must be distinguished from reference.

Warning: This isn't directly related to programming languages. In fact, if you haven't studied Frege this paper might be quite puzzling.

While not directly programming language related, I still think this paper might be of interest. Frege is quite an important figure in the history of logic, of course, and as we all know logic and computation are very much related to each other.

In addition, this paper deals with the notions of function and predicate, and these notions are part of our standard terminology. Reading this paper might improve our understanding of these notions and their history, as well as the notions of equality vs. identity, and intensional vs. extensional view of functions (see the end of section 4).

By Ehud Lamm at 2005-12-11 20:36 | General | other blogs | 7764 reads

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Not much comment...

It's a nice overview of Frege's thought, but I guess the LtU crowd is asking: so what does this all have to do with programming languages?

I'll stake out two claims: one is that the way that natural languages succeed or fail to be about the world has a lot of parallels with how programming langauges can succeed or fail to do what the programmer wanted them to do. And then, if you care about distilling down your understanding of programming language concepts, then maybe an understanding of key ideas in the philosophy of language is useful.

By Charles Stewart at Thu, 2005-12-15 17:58 | login or register to post comments

Strong claim

the way that natural languages succeed or fail to be about the world has a lot of parallels with how programming langauges can succeed or fail to do what the programmer wanted them to do.

That's a strong claim. I wouldn't want to be the one having to defend it... ;-)

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2005-12-15 18:01 | login or register to post comments