"Thought: A Logical Inquiry" is an essay by

Gottlob Frege Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege (; ; 8 November 1848 – 26 July 1925) was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematician. He was a mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philos ...

. It was published as "Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung" in the philosophy journal ''Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus'' (English: Contributions to the philosophy of

German idealism German idealism is a philosophical movement that emerged in Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It developed out of the work of Immanuel Kant in the 1780s and 1790s, and was closely linked both with Romanticism and the revolutionary ...

) in 1918. It was republished in ''

Mind The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills. It covers the totality of mental phenomena, including both conscious processes, through which an individual is aware of external and internal circumstances ...

'' in English in 1956. In it, Frege argues against idealism and for

platonism Platonism is the philosophy of Plato and philosophical systems closely derived from it, though contemporary Platonists do not necessarily accept all doctrines of Plato. Platonism has had a profound effect on Western thought. At the most fundam ...

about thoughts, or

propositions A proposition is a statement that can be either true or false. It is a central concept in the philosophy of language, semantics, logic, and related fields. Propositions are the object s denoted by declarative sentences; for example, "The sky ...

. Frege says ideas are private, but thoughts are public. Frege said that such

abstract objects In philosophy and the arts, a fundamental distinction exists between abstract and concrete entities. While there is no universally accepted definition, common examples illustrate the difference: numbers, sets, and ideas are typically classified ...

were members of a third realm.

, "Der Gedanke. Eine logische Untersuchung", in: ''Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus'' 1 (1918/19), pp. 58–77; esp. p. 69. Frege also argued for a

redundancy theory of truth According to the redundancy theory of truth (also known as the disquotational theory of truth), asserting that a statement is true is completely equivalent to asserting the statement itself. For example, asserting the sentence Snow is white' is tru ...

. Quoting Frege, "The thought, in itself immaterial, clothes itself in the material garment of a sentence and thereby becomes comprehensible to us. We say a sentence expresses a thought."

References

External links

Thought
{{DEFAULTSORT:Thought, The Analytic philosophy Philosophy essays Philosophy of language literature 1918 essays Linguistic turn Platonism Propositions German essays Works by Gottlob Frege