Disgriceful Decompositions

From Janseen's study of Frege, as per online source discussed in previous blogs:

"The most well known fragment of Frege which reminds of compositionality is
the first sentence of Gedankegefuege in the translation by Geach & Stoothoff."

FREGE:

"It is astonishing what language can do. With a few syllables it can
express an incalculable number of thoughts, so that even a thought
grasped by a terrestrial being for the very first time can be put into
a form of words which will be understood by someone to whom the
thought is entirely new. This would be impossible, were we not able
to distinguish parts in the thoughts corresponding to the parts of a
sentence, so that the structure of the sentence serves as the image of
the structure of the thoughts."

"This fragment has been used to show that Frege abandoned contextuality and
adopted compositionality (e.g. Resnik [47, p.47])."

"There are several arguments why that is not correct."

"First about the translation of the second sentence."

"It contains the phrase ‘a thought [: : :] can be put into a form of words which will be understood by someone : : :’".

"If one parses this as ’words which will be understood’ one might
see here a glimpse of the idea that thoughts are built."

"The original version
does not have such a possibility because it reads:


eine Einkleidung findet, in der ihn ein anderer erkennen kann.

"A more literal translation is:

finds a form in which someone else can recognize it.

"So Frege said that the thought is
recognized, and not that (as a first step) words are understood."

"The second reason is that the last sentence of the quote (‘this would be
impossible’) does not speak about the formation of the sense of a sentence from
the senses of its parts."

"The sentence obeys contextuality because it starts from
the sense of the sentence, the thought, and distinguishes therein parts of the
thought."

"Thirdly, immediately after the quote follows: ‘to be sure, we really talk
figuratively when we transfer the relation of whole and part to thoughts; yet
the analogy is so ready to hand and so generally appropriate that we are hardly
ever bothered by the hitches which occur from time to time.’"

"So the quote is an analogy, used to express an idea about thoughts, not to convey any principle on natural language in general."

"Finally, the analogy concerns only compound thoughts, i.e. thoughts which
have a thought as part."

"Frege warns us that not all sentences composed from a
sentence provide a serviceable example, e.g. relative clauses are not an example
‘because they do not express a thought (we cannot tell what the relative pronoun
is supposed to refer to)’".

"So Frege acknowledges here only meanings for those parts which had a meaning anyhow: sentences which express thoughts."

IMPORTANT CONCLUSIONS THAT ANY GRICEAN SHOULD DIGEST with pleasure:

"The conclusion is that Frege in the first and second sentence of the quote
does not say anything about the formation of sentence meaning from smaller
units."

"The quote is not a expression of what we understand by the principle of
compositionality."

"In Gedankengefuege Frege makes a remark which is most relevant for the investigations concerning the relation between Frege and the principles."

"Frege investigates compound thoughts like

A and B

(called compound thoughts of the first kind),

not [A and B]

(the second kind) ,

‘not A and not B’

(the third kind) etc..

"He gives a complete inventory of binary connectives
made up from negation and conjunction."

"When considering compound
thoughts of the form

‘Not [. . . and . . . ]

Frege says:

"By filling the gaps with expressions of thoughts, we form the expression
of a compound thought of the second kind."

"But we really should not
talk of the compound thought as originating in this way, for it is a
thought, and a thought does not originate."

"In the line of his argumentation Frege is almost forced to say that a compound
thought of the form

Not [: : : and : : :]

is formed from two other thoughts, thus following the compositional approach."

"But that is a way of speaking which he cannot accept."

"Thoughts are objective (recall Grundlagen), we can only grasp
or recognize them, but

-----------------thoughts do not originate."

"Frege explicitly denies in
this published paper that thoughts are formed, and therefore he would deny
compositionality as well."

Excellent.

Grice went to analyse that in terms of the internalisation of content in say, an eagle.

The eagle spots a rabbit. But also a hawk in the nearby branch. So the eagle is having a 'dijunctional thought': to attack the rabbit, or stay calm because she does not want to get involved in a fight with a co-predator.

It would be otiose to say that the eagle first thought one disjunct, and then another and then compounded them.

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