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

himself. He will always be the world’s best Frege scholar to me. I want to thank him for over fifty
years of wonderful service not only to the community of Frege scholars, but to the world of philosophy
at large. Thanks to his devotion and integrity, and his ability to bring out the huge volumes of thought
implicit in Frege, he has done more than anyone to bring Frege to his rightful place in philosophy.
Notes
1. Dummett prefers the term “referents” (1981: 94; 1981a: 2).
2. My (1979: 59–85), summarized in my (1982: 2–5), and updated in my (1996: 104–9; 2003: 104–9).
All three provide a specific analysis explaining why Frege’s formally explicit definition of Number is
implicitly and functionally a contextual definition, in contrast to Dummett’s general and conclusory
paragraph (1995: 4–5). The heart of the analysis is that once we see that parallel completions of (A)
identity statements about numbers, (B) statements of the equinumerosity of certain concepts, and (C)
identity statements about the extensions of those concepts, are logically equivalent, the mediation of
(B) can drop out and the identification of numbers with the extensions can take on a life of its own (and
this takes us to the later Frege). The end result is an explicit definition, just as Dummett says, but this is
just a husk covering up the contextual work of (B)’s mediation. I mailed a copy of my (1979) to
Dummett in 1979. He never replied. I wonder if he ever received it. Imagine if he had recanted in 1979!
3. Strictly, about the object that represents identity, namely, a double course-of-values.
4. The geometry permutation is also a private language argument (compare Dummett 1981: 638–42). In
Grundlagen, Frege uses private language arguments to show that numbers are mind-independently
objective long before he uses the context principle to define numbers.
5. This is not Quine’s sense, which involves a fact of the matter (Gibson 1987: 147; Quine 1987: 155).
6. Grundgesetze vol. 1, §§ 0, 30; Frege (1980c: 36–37; 1970d: 42–43; 1970f: 59–61).
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