{"agent_id":"frege","agent_name":"Gottlob Frege","slug":"anti-psychologism-and-the-third-realm-of-thoughts","label":"Anti-psychologism and the third realm of Thoughts: are Thoughts (Gedanken) objective abstract entities inhabiting a realm distinct from the physical and the psychological?","topic":"Anti-psychologism and the third realm of Thoughts","question":"Are Thoughts (Gedanken) objective abstract entities inhabiting a realm distinct from the physical and the psychological?","position":"Logic is not a branch of psychology. The laws of logic are not generalisations about how human beings happen to think; they are laws of truth, normative on thought rather than descriptive of it. A *Gedanke* (Thought) is the *Sinn* of an assertoric sentence — an objective abstract entity, neither a physical object nor a psychological event nor a *Vorstellung* (mental image). Thoughts inhabit a *third realm*: distinct from the physical world of bodies and from the inner world of mental events, accessible to multiple minds, eternally true or false, independent of being grasped. Two thinkers who grasp the same Thought grasp numerically the same entity; if Thoughts were mental contents, every thinker's \"thought that 2+2=4\" would be a different thought and shared knowledge would be impossible. The objectivity of mathematics, the possibility of communication, and the very intelligibility of disagreement all require that Thoughts be objective.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Logic is not a branch of psychology.","n":[]},{"t":"The laws of logic are not generalisations about how human beings happen to think; they are laws of truth, normative on thought rather than descriptive of it.","n":[]},{"t":"A *Gedanke* (Thought) is the *Sinn* of an assertoric sentence — an objective abstract entity, neither a physical object nor a psychological event nor a *Vorstellung* (mental image).","n":[]}],[{"t":"Thoughts inhabit a *third realm*: distinct from the physical world of bodies and from the inner world of mental events, accessible to multiple minds, eternally true or false, independent of being grasped.","n":[]},{"t":"Two thinkers who grasp the same Thought grasp numerically the same entity; if Thoughts were mental contents, every thinker's \"thought that 2+2=4\" would be a different thought and shared knowledge would be impossible.","n":[]}],[{"t":"The objectivity of mathematics, the possibility of communication, and the very intelligibility of disagreement all require that Thoughts be objective.","n":[1,2,3,4,5]}]],"texts":"Review of Husserl's *Philosophie der Arithmetik* (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 1894); the Introduction to Grundgesetze Volume I (1893), especially the celebrated polemic against psychologistic logic; Der Gedanke (1918); Negation (1918); Compound Thoughts (1923); Logic in Mathematics (Nachlass 1914) and the Logic essays in Posthumous Writings (Blackwell 1979); Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884), Introduction and §§26-27. Reception: Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen Volume I, Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900) for the convergent anti-psychologism in mature Husserl; Tyler Burge, 'Frege on Knowing the Third Realm' (Mind 1992), reprinted in Truth, Thought, Reason (Oxford 2005); Wolfgang Künne, Conceptions of Truth (Oxford 2003); W. V. O. Quine, 'On What There Is' (Review of Metaphysics 1948) and Word and Object (MIT 1960) for the naturalist worry about Platonism; Crispin Wright, 'Why Frege Does Not Deserve His Grain of Salt' (1998); Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language Chapter 13 (1973/1981); Hilary Putnam, 'Meaning and Reference' (Journal of Philosophy 1973) and the externalist tradition.","works":["Review of Husserl's *Philosophie der Arithmetik* (Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik 1894)","the Introduction to Grundgesetze Volume I (1893), especially the celebrated polemic against psychologistic logic","Der Gedanke (1918)","Negation (1918)","Compound Thoughts (1923)","Logic in Mathematics (Nachlass 1914) and the Logic essays in Posthumous Writings (Blackwell 1979)","Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884), Introduction and §§26-27"],"reception":"Edmund Husserl, Logische Untersuchungen Volume I, Prolegomena to Pure Logic (1900) for the convergent anti-psychologism in mature Husserl; Tyler Burge, 'Frege on Knowing the Third Realm' (Mind 1992), reprinted in Truth, Thought, Reason (Oxford 2005); Wolfgang Künne, Conceptions of Truth (Oxford 2003); W. V. O. Quine, 'On What There Is' (Review of Metaphysics 1948) and Word and Object (MIT 1960) for the naturalist worry about Platonism; Crispin Wright, 'Why Frege Does Not Deserve His Grain of Salt' (1998); Michael Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language Chapter 13 (1973/1981); Hilary Putnam, 'Meaning and Reference' (Journal of Philosophy 1973) and the externalist tradition.","status":"The foundational doctrine of Frege's mature philosophy of mind and language and the locus classicus of 20th-century anti-psychologism. The 1894 review of Husserl's *Philosophie der Arithmetik* is the most celebrated polemic in the tradition; Husserl himself in the *Logische Untersuchungen* Prolegomena (1900) developed a convergent anti-psychologism, crediting Frege's critique in part. Tyler Burge's \"Frege on Knowing the Third Realm\" (1992) is the canonical contemporary defence; his *Truth, Thought, Reason* (2005) develops the anti-individualist line. Quine's naturalist worries about Platonism, the post-Wittgensteinian rejection of the third realm in some readings of *Philosophical Investigations*, and the externalist tradition descending from Putnam's \"Meaning and Reference\" (1973) are the principal contemporary challenges. Most analytic philosophers retain some version of the anti-psychologism even where they refuse the Platonist ontology of the third realm.","era":"1848-1925","discipline":"Philosophy","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Posthumous Writings","page":"pp. 162–163","canonical":"","quote":"Then the cause of this might be that the phosphorus content in the cerebral cortex had changed, and we should then have to say something like 'If the amount of phosphorus present in any part of man's cerebral cortex does not exceed 4%, his judgement will always be in accordance with the law that every object is identical with itself.\" We can at least conceive of psychological laws that refer in this way to the…","label":"Posthumous Writings, pp. 162–163"},{"n":2,"work":"Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy","page":"pp. 368–369","canonical":"","quote":"I have, of course, got an idea then, but that is not what J am using the words 'that lime-tree' to designate. Now someone might really want to designate one of his ideas with the words 'that lime-tree'. He would then be the owner of that to which he wants to designate with those words, but then he would not see that lime-tree and no one else would see it or be its owner.","label":"Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, pp. 368–369"},{"n":3,"work":"Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy","page":"p. 375","canonical":"","quote":"Otherwise psychology would rule even over logic and mathematics. But nothing would be a greater misunderstanding of mathematics than making it subordinate to psychology. Neither logic nor mathematics has the task of investigating minds and contents of consciousness owned by individual men. Their task could perhaps be represented rather as the investigation of the mind; of the mind, not of minds.","label":"Collected Papers on Mathematics, Logic, and Philosophy, p. 375"},{"n":4,"work":"Posthumous Writings","page":"p. 147","canonical":"","quote":"There would be no science, no error and no correction of error; properly speaking, there would be nothing true in the normal sense of the word. For this is so closely bound up with that independence of being recognized as true, which we are emphasizing here, that it cannot be separated from it.","label":"Posthumous Writings, p. 147"},{"n":5,"work":"Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence","page":"p. 85","canonical":"","quote":"There is no way of telling whether Frege also received the other articles. The fifth article is a critical discussion of Anton Marty, Uber subjektlose Sditze und das Verhdltnis der Grammatik zur Logik und Psychologie, 6th and 7th articles, VierteYahrsschrift fiir wissenschaftliche Philosophie X1X (1895), pp. 19-87 and 263-334.","label":"Philosophical and Mathematical Correspondence, p. 85"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"sense-and-reference-sinn-und-bedeutung","label":"Sense and reference (Sinn und Bedeutung): does every meaningful expression have both a sense and a reference, or are proper names directly referential as Kripke claims?"},{"slug":"logicism-and-russell-s-paradox","label":"Logicism and Russell's paradox: is arithmetic reducible to logic, and does the failure of Basic Law V refute the logicist program or only its 1893 formulation?"},{"slug":"the-concept-object-distinction","label":"The concept-object distinction: are concepts and objects fundamentally distinct, and is the Concept Horse paradox a refutation or a feature of the analysis?"}]}