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

composed of simpler logical subject- and predicate-names.
We must also not be confused by Frege’s statement that “I call anything a proper name if it is a
sign for an object” (1970d: 47 n.*). Dummett is wrongly converting this to “If anything is a proper
name, then it names an object.” The conversion is restricted to customary references.
Dummett himself cites a text that “an object such as Mont Blanc cannot be part of a
thought”(1981a: 533n). Indeed, Dummett knows as well as anyone it is Frege’s famous view that “the
object is not...itself a constituent of the thought,” and that an object such as a mountain “is not the sort
of thing that can be a constituent of a thought” (1981a: 130; see 137–38, 177, 533n). Yet Dummett
insists just two pages later that “at least some senses are objects” (1981a: 132). Dummett’s way out is
to say that it is only wirklich or concrete objects that cannot be senses (1981a: 393). I disagree. Frege’s
terminology is misleading. What we would normally call his realism, he calls objectivism. It is
objective entities as such that are logically mind-independent, i.e., exist and are as they are
independently of the manner in which we think of, regard, conceive, or speak of them. “Wirklich”
ordinarily translates as “actual” or “real.” Frege’s “wirklich” is best translated as “causal.” He has in
mind a causal activity or capacity that has nothing to do with the issue of metaphysical realism. Senses
are not wirklich; they can act on us only in the passive sense of being sometimes grasped by us, and
thus affecting how we regard things. That is a special but secondary reason why concrete objects
cannot be senses. The general and primary reason is that to allow any object, wirklich or not, to be a
part of a thought would destroy the objectual realism implicit in Frege’s sense-reference distinction. It
is not just our accompanying subjective idea, but even our objective sense via which we think about a
mountain, that must be distinguished from the mountain itself. Frege says, “[W]hen we say ‘the Moon’,
we do not intend to speak of our idea of the Moon, nor are we satisfied with the sense alone, but we
presuppose a reference”(1970f: 61, my emphasis). And Frege applies this realism, which he calls his
objectivism, with the strictest sameness to abstract objects. This is precisely Frege’s solution of what
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