Dummett's Backward Road to Frege and to Intuitionism - Tripod

(compare Dummett 1981: 626). And for Frege, everything is regimented at once. This resolves the
problem of double oratio obliqua. In ordinary language, the obliqua chips fall where they may. But in
the formal notation, since all opaque contexts and all senses, however indirect, are regimented at once,
it is always determinate which sense is expressed in which context.
Definitions stipulate references only via senses, but Dummett’s program rightly does not
concern them. For Frege, definitions are never needed to say what we want to say. They merely
abbreviate.
3. Does the program work?
Dummett never attempts an example of how his program works. I have already argued that it
does not work even if we pump it up with advance knowledge of which portions of sentences to count
as subsentential names, and of the senses and references of all primitive logical names, in the object-
language. But an example may help.
Suppose the vocabulary of object-language L is already given as four blank object-names, “a,”
“b,” “c,” and “d,” one blank concept-name, “F( ),” “blank” meaning without their senses or references,
plus Frege’s eight primitive logical names with their senses and references. We are then told the truth-
conditions of all atomic sentences of L. That can be done only via thoughts, but we can then disregard
the thoughts in a sleight of hand in place of the magical start the program demands. Now, if we knew
which objects in the world were a, b, c, and d, and that they were the only four objects in the world,
and (3) that only a, b, and c fall under the concept F, then there would be no permutation problems for
the object-names (e.g. cards or decks), and we could enumeratively define “F( )” as referring to the
function that maps arguments a, b, and c, but not d, onto the True. But we are not entitled to know
these things on Dummett’s program. Knowing them would amount to knowing the truth-values of the
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