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

“problem” (1981a: 87–88, citing 1981: 268). My view is that the earlier Dummett is right that for Frege
there is no backward road, and the 1993 Dummett is right that the context principle is actively used in
Grundlagen and implicit in Grundgesetze. But the 1993 Dummett is interpreting the context principle
too strongly, so that it permits and even requires a backward road in Frege’s theory of sense and
reference.
2. Problems with the program
Dummett’s program has at least seven problems.
The first problem is a dilemma based on an ambiguity. Dummett says, “Our theory may
accordingly specify outright the conditions for a sentence of a given form to be true or false....” But
when we are given the form of a sentence, does he mean that we are given (1) that the form of sentence
S is the form of, say, an identity statement? If so, then we are not given which subsentential name in S
refers to the identity relation or which subsentential names in S are the logical subject-names. Even if S
is “a = b”, we have no right to assume that the subsentential expressions are what they usually are.
How can we derive references and senses for subsentential names if we do not even know how to parse
a sentence into names, that is, if we do not know which physical portions of the sentence to count as
names? We would be lost before we started. We have only a list of complete sentences of the object-
language to work with, and not a list of subsentential names. Or does he mean that (2) we are given (1)
plus which portion of an identity statement to count as the name referring to the identity relation and
which portions to count as the logical subject-names?
It might seem that Dummett has option (1) in mind, since he continues, “that is, to have one or
other truth-value as its Bedeutung;” which would not give us any clue as to how to parse sentence S
into names. And he further continues, “but it cannot fix the Bedeutung of any term by specifying that it
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