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

of “On Denoting” in order to see why Dummett’s mistake is genuine.
I think Frege would agree that there is no backward road for this very reason. Frege says that a
sense “serves to illuminate only a single aspect of the reference,” and that we cannot achieve
“[c]omprehensive knowledge of the reference” unless we can already “say...whether any given sense
belongs to it” (1970f: 58). Nor can we pick out an aspect, i.e., property, i.e., concept under which the
reference falls, except via a sense.
In Frege: Philosophy of Language, Dummett admits Russell is right that there is no backward
road in Frege (1981: 267–8). Nonetheless, he offers the following argument against Russell’s explicit
“no backward road” thesis, and by implication the implicit thesis as well:
The sense of an expression is the mode of presentation of the referent: in saying what
the referent is, we have to choose a particular way of saying this, a particular means of
determining something as the referent. In a case in which we are concerned to convey,
or stipulate, the sense of the expression, we shall choose that means of stating what the
reference is which displays the sense: we might here borrow a famous pair of terms
from the Tractatus, and say that, for Frege, we say what the referent of a word is, and
thereby show what its sense is. (This is the correct answer to Russell’s objection in ‘On
Denoting’ to Frege’s theory, considered generally, rather than apropos of oblique
reference, that there is ‘no backward road’ from reference to sense.) (1981: 227)
I call this the forced choice argument. Dummett is arguing as follows. A reference must be given in
some way. And a sense is a way of giving a reference (if any). Therefore we can fix a sense by simply
choosing it as the way we choose to fix the reference (if any). Therefore we can fix a reference and
thereby fix a sense. The implied conclusion is that this removes the sensial underdetermination problem
27