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

entities in different categories, we will all be in trouble, except for kind-monists. This is not to mention
how tightly Frege ties linguistic function to ontological category. Thus the best gloss is that tones are
emergent entities for Frege. And if tones are a special kind of emergent entities, this would provide an
excellent explanation of why they are a unique category. It would also remove the mystery about their
nature. For the concept of an emergent entity is a merely logical concept. An emergent entity is merely
an entity that has at least one property none of its logical constituents has.
Similarly for forces. Frege says assertion is the objective communication of a judgment, where a
judgment is an indefinable sort of inward recognition (1979e: 139; 1968a: 513; see 1970f: 65; 1970e:
126, 126 n.*). A very plausible gloss would be that forces are really kinds of objective speech acts,
namely acts which communicate inward states such as recognition or query. This is plausible because
the assertion sign (judgment stroke) is part of the objectively communicable formal notation. That
would place forces on the objective side of the house. But if so, my criticism of Frege is that this only
sweeps the emergent nature of forces under the rug. Taken by themselves, neither the objective nor the
subjective components of assertions are outward communications of inward recognitions. Such
communication is essentially relational and clearly an emergent property. Thus the best gloss is that
forces are emergent entities for Frege. But we already know assertion cannot be an object or a function.
For Frege says the assertion sign (judgment stroke) cannot function as a name, on pain of reducing
assertions to suppositions (Grundgesetze vol. 1, § 5; see 1968a: 514); and we have seen how tightly he
ties linguistic function to ontological category.
Thus tones and forces are unique categories; they are irreducible to each other. But we can
“take” them “as” objects by first “taking” their subjective components “as” objects, and thus refer to
them as easily as we can refer to ideas. I call this a “double take” (pun intended). Thus the second
model seems workable for tones and forces, if Frege’s single take works. 32
The third model is best. Frege’s tones, forces, and verbal explications are part of speech as
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