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

in which he is deriving the general notion of a sense from the general notion of a reference, and the
general notion of a thought from the general notion of a truth-condition, per his (1981: 5). But instead
he speaks of “primitive symbols [and] their Bedeutungen and...Sinne,” as if we could derive the senses
of specific names such as “red” from specific truth-conditions in the order of cognition.
Dummett’s thesis that all senses are ways of identifying references, if conjoined with his thesis
that all senses are identified by means of truth-conditions, which consist of references, creates a vicious
circle in the order of cognition. But I think his interpretation conflates the orders of cognition and
being.
The two orders form an ancient pattern. After we cognitively ascend from Plato’s Cave to the
Sun, we can look back to see the true place of the Cave in the order of being as participatively
dependent on, but also as a distorted way of apprehending, the world of forms. On this deep ontological
level, I do not see Frege as departing from tradition. This deepens my 2003 thesis.
Dummett’s program appears to be an idealization of a more concrete interpretation Dummett
has of Frege which I shall call “Dummett’s project.” I quoted Dummett’s program from near the end of
Dummett’s 1995 paper. Dummett’s project is stated by Dummett’s 1995 paper as a whole, which I
shall now briefly summarize in my own way.
In Grundlagen, a fundamental principle is always to separate the objective (mind-independent)
from the subjective (mental). The admission of mind-independent entities is Frege’s basic realism.
Frege argues for it using a permutational private language argument (duality of geometry). Namely, we
cannot communicate private ideas because they can be permuted across speakers. In Grundlagen, the
objective world divides into objects and (if you please) functions. There they are Inhalten or contents,
which the later Frege splits into senses and references. Thus contents are strictly neither senses nor
references. But that is because they are both, only not yet differentiated. If we were to try to
differentiate them, we would find fluctuations in Frege’s talk of contents in Grundlagen. So to speak,
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