Re: Existence and presupposition


William of Ockham wrote:
> My German is not good enough for this,

Of course it is. Absolutely no German at all
would STILL be good enough. There is simply
no obligation to treat anything in the original
with the reverence that the likes of you and
Franz Fritsche are so ridiculously mis-prone
to treat it. THAT was THEN. THIS is NOW.
THIS is NEWER AND BETTER BECAUSE it has had the
benefit of decades of intervening thought to
MAKE it better.

> Beaney says that German speakers
> find Frege's use of
> "Bedeutung" odd.

English-speakers would correspondingly find
YOUR use (OR the 3rd edition's) of "meaning" odd,
if reference is what was meant.

>
> If a translator decides to translate Frege's "Bedeutung"
> quite literally as "meaning", then he must add the
> following introductory
> note so as not to lead the contemporary readers astray:

It bears stressing that in what *I* was replying to,
YOU had NOT added it, and that I therefore owe no one
an apology for HAVING been led astray!

>
> "Always keep in mind that when Frege
> uses 'Bedeutung' he doesn't mean
> what we now mean by 'meaning' but
> what we mean by 'reference'!"

Well, that is helpful, but it is late.

>
> But the question is what WE mean by reference.

No, REALLY, that is NOT the question.
WE KNOW what we mean by reference, insofar
as anyody CAN know anything that gets this
rough around the edges (like "recursively
enumerable", e.g.). If YOU DON'T know then
you need to read NOT ONLY some more Frege,
but some more Tyler Burge, and some more Quine,
and some more of everybody else as well.
And stop committing so much idolatry upon
the original.

The later passage you quote about Johnson and
some earlier use is just idiotic for purposes of
this debate. The fact that somebody chose to use
the word "reference" in some OTHER sense ("the referential
sense of" some word that could have other senses)
is simply not germane. In the original Fregean paradigm,
EVERYthing had a sense and it was actually the sense,
in the context, that determined the referent: the association
of the reference with the WORD was INdirect.

.

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