Grundgesetze der Arithmetik I \S\S 29-32 (Q1130240)

In \S 29-31 of Grundgesetze I Frege gives a complex argument to the effect that every well-formed expression of Begriffsschrift denotes. The author offers an interpretation of these paragraphs under which Frege's argument is not at all the ``complete mess'' it is traditionally believed to be. Frege's argument is ultimately irremediably flawed, for it does not succeed in showing that the operator which forms names of value-ranges (the ``smooth breathing'') denotes. The reason for this is that there is an analogue of the so-called Julius Caesar problem for Frege's stipulation regarding the denotation of the smooth breathing. A diagonal argument shows that Frege's attempt to get around this problem fails. But with only a modicum of anachronism and some emendation Frege's argumentation does show that all well-formed expressions of Begriffsschrift which do not contain occurrences of the smooth breathing denote. In fact, Frege's argumentation anticipates Tarski's theory of truth, except that Frege did not have a notion of an assignment to free variables. Instead, Frege explicates the truth-conditions of quantified formulas using auxiliary names, which do not belong to the formal language of Begriffsschrift, and which denote arbitrary objects of the domain. Frege's alternative to Tarski's theory is applicable to most ordinary (classical) languages.