[FOM] FOM: FREGE ON SELF-EVIDENCE AND ON THE PROPERTY OF BEING SELF-EVIDENT

[Richard Heck]

Here are a few quick thoughts:

>Q1. Do Frege's translators use some other English expression in rendering Frege's German on this topic? Is 'self-evident' just a bad translation?
>
I don't know the answer to this question. The German in your second 
quote is "einleuchtend". I don't have a German copy of the 
correspondence at home here.

>Q2. Does Frege anywhere indicate the kind of criterion, feeling or perception that he took to warrant ascription of "self-evident" to a belief?
>  
>
No, not so far as I know. One question here is whether feelings and 
perceptions are the right sorts of things to be discussing. Jeshion and 
Burge (see below) seem agreed, and I'm inclined to think they are right, 
that "self-evidence" is not, for Frege, really a psychological notion.

>Q3. Does Frege anywhere indicate the kind of criterion, feeling or perception that he took to warrant ascription of "purely logical" to a belief?
>  
>
Again, no. So far as I know, Frege does not offer any criterion for the 
"purely logical". Some commentators have suggested, or at least implied, 
that "maximum generality" would be such a criterion. But it is a 
necessary condition at best, since "There are objects that are not 
value-ranges" would be maximally general if Basic Law V is, whence it 
would be a logical truth if true. In some of his early writings, Frege 
writes of laws of logic as being "laws of thought" in a sense that has 
real Kantian echoes---they are, as it were, laws of the 
understanding---but that sort of talk vanishes from his later writing. 
In the introduction to /Grundgesetze/, for example, he considers and 
dismisses what amounts to a transcendental argument for the law of 
non-contradiction.

This idea that laws of logic were laws of thought, in some such sense, 
appears to have been very much in the air in Frege's time. I recently 
had reason to read Boole's /The Laws of Thought/ and was really quite 
astonished by how psychologistic his conception is.

>Q4. Does Frege anywhere indicate the kind of procedure he followed in arriving at his judgement of the "validity" of his axioms or of the "cogency" of his rules of inference?
>  
>
No, not directly. That said, however, the informal semantics developed 
in Part I of /Grundgesetze/ is used to give informal arguments for the 
truth of the basic laws and the validity of the rules. The one 
exception, unsurprisingly, is Basic Law V, the argument for whose truth 
is very indirect: That's the infamous argument in sections 29-32. So one 
might naturally conjecture that Frege was relying upon something like an 
inchoate model-theoretic conception.

>Q5. Does Frege anywhere indicate the kind of procedure he followed in arriving at his judgment of the "non-validity" of a "thought" or "proposition" or of the "non-cogency" of a rule of progressing from proposition to proposition?
>  
>
Again, not directly, though there is the long discussion in the third 
part of the second paper on the foundations of geometry, which develops 
an informal model-theoretic account. Unfortunately, however, Frege 
explicitly denies that it would be applicable to logic itself. 
Nonetheless, since Frege's basic laws are all, in effect, universally 
quantified, and since he showed no serious interest in any modal 
notions, one would suppose that "non-validity" could be established by 
the presentation of a counter-instance. That, of course, won't 
distinguish mere truth from logical validity, but, as said, Frege 
doesn't seem to have had a developed view about logicality.

>Q6. Aside from the above mentioned passages where does Frege discuss self-evidence or the property of being self-evident?
>  
>
I believe there are more such passages. Do you know Robin Jeshion's 
paper "Frege on Self-Evidence"? I think she collects all relevant 
passages. She would probably have some information about the other 
issues, as well, so you might want to contact her. She's at 
UC-Riverside. Tyler Burge has also thought a lot about these matters and 
may have looked into some of these questions, too: See his "Frege on 
Knowing the Foundation".

Richard Heck