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

condition for each of its sentences to be true. It is only in doing so that one who knows
that language knows the Bedeutungen of its terms; hence to stipulate in the
metalanguage that certain terms are to denote certain objects is at best to take as
understood what the theory should be explaining. The only way in which a speaker of
the object-language can specify the Bedeutung of one of its terms is by using some co-
referential term, which he recognises as such by his grasp of statements of identity. This
is but part of his knowledge of what determines the truth or falsity of sentences
containing the term; it is the content of that knowledge which the theory of Bedeutung
must exhibit. (1995: 16–17, my emphasis)
In this puzzling passage, it looks for all the world as if Dummett is saying that it is by specifying the
truth-conditions of a “sentence of a given form,” and “only [by] doing so,” that we can explain the
references of its subsentential terms, and thereby also the “intended Sinne” expressed by those terms.
The sole exception noted is that we must presuppose knowledge of what the truth-values are, though
not of which sentences are true and which are false. These objects are Frege’s sentential references. But
they are also subsentential references. We can use “the True” to refer to the True. It might seem from
the phrase “any other object [than a truth-value]” that Dummett is allowing us to fix the Bedeutung of
“the True” as the True. This seems to contradict the aim of the program. But the phrase’s grammatical
reference is unclear to me, and I shall charitably assume Dummett does not mean that. In any case, the
passage states the semantic program Dummett interprets Frege as having. I shall call it “Dummett’s
program.”
Dummett is saying that for Frege, there is a backward road from reference to sense. This departs
from Dummett’s earlier books in which he held Russell is right that there is no backward road for Frege
(1981a: 87, 95; 1981: 267), and amended Frege’s theory because the no backward road thesis is a
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