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

176–77). Since senses are entities, this would make facts entities for Frege. On my view, if facts are
entities, they are strictly speaking emergent entities with a thought and an object—the True—as
components. There is nothing like this in Russell or Wittgenstein. But it might be better to say that
Frege is merely analyzing away an ordinary sense of the word “fact.”
12. The following four items in Frege must not be confused with each other: (a) the abstract
(noncausal) extensional in sense (2) concept red, (b) the abstract intensional in sense (2) sense
expressed by “red,” (c) a concrete (causal) extensional in sense (2) red object in the physical world, and
(d) an extensional in sense (2) mental sensation of red, normally had by one when one perceives a red
object. Now, if (d) is concrete (causal), or even has normal or law-like patterns of occurrence, then to
that extent (d) is objective, pace Frege’s classification of ideas as subjective and in flux, and pace his
sharp separation of the objective from the subjective. Frege allows, and I think requires, at least
resemblances across different persons’ ideas even to explain art.
13. Thus Frege would reject Dummett’s solution of the oratio obliqua problem. Dummett is very clear
that his solution is “emendation,” not scholarship (1981: 267, 268; 1981a: 87).
14. Dummett says Frege found that the traditional concept of abstraction is irrelevant to the notion of
sense, and does not use it in his final account; but Dummett admits that this final account concerns the
formal notation and not ordinary language (Dummett 1981: 676–78). This is consistent with my view
that Frege never retracts his early paper (1972) on the basic role of abstraction in learning ordinary
language.
Frege denies that traditional abstraction can yield a logically adequate concept of number
(Grundlagen, §§ 34, 44; 1970c: 84–85). But in Grundlagen, § 89 he does not repudiate Kant’s principle
that concepts without percepts are blind, which is the heart of abstraction, altogether, but only for
numbers. Indeed, he calls this “the mistake of supposing that a concept can only be acquired by direct
abstraction from a number of objects” (§ 49, my emphasis.) This implies he thinks some concepts are
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