Frege’s Ingredients of Meaning

Although Frege spent his entire working life at the University of Jena teaching mathematics, he once remarked, “Every good mathematician is at least half a philosopher.”1 If he had done nothing else besides inventing modern predicate logic with the introduction of quantifiers and variables into his function-and-argument approach to analyzing sentences, Frege’s elevated place in the history of both logic and the philosophy of logic would be assured and his genius stamped and sealed for all time. His contributions, however, are not confined to philosophical logic and mathematical logic; on the contrary, they are of immense importance to the philosophy of language. Frege wrote his first published paper, ‘Funktion und Begriff, 122 years ago, and his last, ‘Nebengedanke’, 90 years ago.2 Despite the passage of time and the many developments that have shaped the course of semantics since, Frege’s ideas loom large today. Dummett not long ago observed, “There is scarcely a live question in contemporary philosophy of language for whose examination Frege’s views do not form at least the best starting point.” So it is with the topic of tone and the issues that it involves.