Frege and Russell seminar

The seminar based around Frege and his philosophy of language helped my understanding of the topic as chapter 5 of Kenny’s book really confused me. The sentences which the group discussed and analysed were “The present King of France is not bald” and “There was nobody on the road”. The first sentence regarding the King of France can appear to be either true or false. Without any knowledge you may think that the sentence is true, but there is no King of France as it is a republic so therefore the statement is false. This is one of the primary laws of logic as we need to have knowledge of an object or person before we can decide whether a statement is correct or incorrect. The sentence “There was nobody on the road” is an incorrect statement as you do not know if there is anybody on the road without looking to see if there is anyone.  You would have to use another sentence such as “I can’t see anybody on the road” in order to make a logical sentence.  We also discussed how a universal language would have to be created for the study of language as some languages do not have certain words or phrases that other languages do.  However there are some problems as languages such as Esperanto have been created to be a universal language but has practically died out as a language as everyone would have to learn the same language which would take time. A better idea would be to make a common language such as English or German the standard language as they have already been established and are spoken across the world.

Plato

From the seminar it was clear that language was an important topic for many philosophers during the 19^th century and it was analysed in great depth by people such as Frege and Russell. Language has been analysed for centuries by philosophers including Plato who argued that humans had a perception of an object and if the images all looked the same then we would assume it was the same object. For example if a man saw a chair that had a seat and four legs and then later on saw an armchair then he would assume that the two objects were chairs as they had the same characteristics and appearance.  The podcast below gives a good summary of Frege's works on the philosophy of language and is good if you are unsure of any of the concepts. It is 45 minutes long but worth a watch even if you watch a section each day.