REFORMULATING HISTORICAL ALLIANCES: DEFLATING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF FREGE'S DEPARTURE FROM KANT'S PHILOSOPHY

We argue that the recent debate over the meaning and identification of content has led to a shift in the theoretical circumstances that favored Frege’s divergence from Kant. Quine’s critique of the theoretical distinction of intensional identities removed the certainty that we can distinguish necessary from accidental identifications of content. The decline of the stability of language as a central object for the study of recognizable and predetermined attributes of meaningful information marks the end of the era of philosophical optimism about the superiority of language analysis over psychologism and leads to a resurgence of philosophical emphasis on the study of mind and cognition. The extent of this shift is such that the central discrepancy between Frege's formal methodology of second-order quantification and Kant's synthetic theory of content identification has lost its significance. With the removal of these circumstances and the erosion of this discrepancy, we can now perceive the aspects in which Frege's theory is consistent with, rather than in direct opposition to, the cognitive perspective that Kant himself endorses. These aspects have always been present, but under unfavorable conditions they have been suppressed or disregarded.

Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 FREGE'S HISTORICAL DISAGREEMENT WITH KANT Here are some preliminary remarks before we turn to the content of the article.This article aims to provide a historical evaluation of the differences and similarities between Kant and Frege, considering the context of the ongoing debate on determining the nature of content and judgment.When attempting to determine theoretical similarities between authors, terminological incongruity often presents one of the greatest challenges.In the reading adopted in this article, one must tolerate Frege's disregard for the terms "intuition" and "representation," (Vorstellung) which stems from his antipsychologism and his insistence on not allowing collateral representations when proving theorems.
The terminological disparity, however, must extend beyond a mere nominal distinction.Frege, in his conviction, deemed that he was elucidating a wholly conceptual process, while also acknowledging, akin to Kant, the indispensability of a cognitive connection or delineation for the comprehension of said concept.In the absence of intuition, how would he elucidate this correlation?The primary reason why Frege does not require the notion of "intuition" and "representation" is due to the existence of objective and supposedly non-mental methods for representing the identity of diverse or varying objects.It is important to mention from the beginning that the author was fully aware and acknowledged the problem, or what we can call the "Kantian problem": How can one achieve a balance between conceptual coherence and the potential for expansion, or higher forms of identity, or how explore connections that are more intricate than simple empirical associations?However, he proposed an alternative solution.Gottlob Frege first introduced second-order logic in his 1879 work, Begriffsschrift.To support his claim that arithmetic theory, although analytic, expands our knowledge, Frege introduced second-order quantification and a formal framework centered on a mathematical-inductive projection of content.These technologies facilitate conceptual encodings that bear resemblance to Kant's syntheses of content.But Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 by using these formal techniques, in direct opposition to Kant, Frege wanted to explain logical relationships that are independent of subjective content and phenomenological descriptions.What varies is the approach and the technology used to find a logical solution.In Kant's work, the apparent reliance on an extra-conceptual and arbitrary decision instance -the recourse to intuition -is no longer present in Frege's work due to the introduction of new logical methods: If, in an expression…, a simple or a complex symbol occurs in one or more places and we imagine it as replaceable by another (but the same one each time) at all or some of the places, then we call the part of the expression that shows itself invariant a function and the replaceable part its argument.(FREGE, 1972(FREGE, [1879]], p. 127) Initially, Frege perceived functions as being connected to the analysis of the content of assertions.Later on, he adopted the viewpoint that functions are mappings from one object to another.There is no apparent contradiction between these perspectives.The systematic mapping of objects is a method of representing conceptual relationships that exist in the reasoning process when determining if a sentence is applicable or if a assertion is feasible strategy to refer to the truth.The key point to highlight is Frege's effective use of higherorder quantification in studying the ancestors and hereditaries of relations, indicating that all natural numbers inherit every hereditary concept possessed by zero.This approach allowed him to unveil the linguistic representable structure of the concept of relation, which Kant believed could solely be objectively represented through the "form of sensibility" or the time-space form of intuition: Frege protested against Kant (and Boolean logicians) that he thought only of definitions of the first kind, which is a severe and artificial restriction, while the interesting definitions in logic and mathematics (including his own in Begriffsschrift and FA) are of the second kind.Take for example Frege's definition of successor in a series: The definition is couched in terms of the notion of hereditary property (…) (BAR-ELLI, 2014, p. 12) Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 As Frege's work gained canonical status in the history of philosophy, it became evident that he expanded the concept of analyticity to encompass nontrivial conceptual associations and, more than that, made it possible to express the content of relations in a formal way, without depending on external information or time-spatial content.According to Kevin Klement (2024, p. 358): "Frege argues that this analysis of following in a series shows that what might otherwise be taken as synthetic truths about the nature of series in fact turn out to be analytic consequences of these definitions".
However, the non-requirement of the concept of intuition does not justify its dismissal, because its representation can contribute to different and valuable insights.It is doubtful that in philosophy, as in engineering, the introduction of a new technology will put doctrines based on the old out of work.Be that as it may, Frege quite consciously chose against the use of mentalistic and phenomenological terms.

REPRESENTATION IN FREGE
We will not repeat the story of logicism, which in Frege's own words, "seem to have ended in complete failure" (FREGE, 1924b, p. 264;cf. 1924a, p. 263).It is worth mentioning, however, that Frege's investigation of the complex thinking contained in arithmetic and his attempt to reduce them to simple logical forms developed into a semantic thesis on the role of symbols and the concept of identity.This is already evident in his discussion of the foundations of arithmetic (Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik, 1884) and his description of the nature of number, where Frege points out that it is necessary to consider the need to refer to a concept in order to count.The author brought to philosophy the recognition that "a statement of number contains an assertion about a Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 concept" (1950, p. xi, cf. section 55), and that "a self-subsistent object that can be recognized as the same again" (1950, section 56).
In the initial chapter, we were introduced to the role this second-order assertions played in his understanding of conceptual inductive parameters.
These parameters have the ability to project properties of objects in a sequence, thereby establishing relational encodings that Kant regarded as synthetic.In the present chapter, we will delve into his more developed theory concerning nontrivial identities between contents.Our interest in Frege's career of discussing number passes to a phase which we consider more philosophically mature in his work, when he reflects on the problem of the possible cognition of conceptual identity.In the first paragraph of Uber Sinn und Bedeutung (1892), the author uses a philosophical tone that was not common in his mathematical career to express the puzzle about the difference between the identification of a with a and of a with b.In the words of Fabien Schang: "How to account for the information gain from "a=a" to "a=b", if meaning is reduced to reference?"(SCHANG, 2016, p. 162).
By pointing out the conditions under which the interchangeability of coreferents salva veritate fails, and thus the conditions under which knowledge of the reference is insufficient to reproduce the identity between two objects, the author spreads certain doubts of principle that do not solve the problem but serve a strategic purpose.The author's decision to pose this puzzle as a problem at the beginning of the article can be understood as a strategic part of his antiextensionalism and anti-formalism, since the inclusion of this new semantic contribution -Sense -serves a tactical purpose.
The purpose is tactical, for Frege has raised a far-reaching puzzle with which the pure formalist-extensionalist must grapple and without whose solution this theorist would have reason to distrust his own foundations.On the other hand, Frege's semantics falls far short of the precision and clarity necessary for a broad explanation of semantic competence, leaving the reader with only a few hints and postulates described by the thesis that sentences Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 (Satz) have both a reference, understood and its truth value, and a Sense (Sinn), understood as an objective (rather than merely representative) choice of a method for determining that reference (Gegebenheitsweise).This impasse in Frege's theory is the basis for the following split situation: the author suggests the inspirational foundation of an intensional theory, but without offering a way out of the conundrum he describes.Strictly speaking, according to the classical diagnosis, the intersubstitution problems described by Frege arise from opaque contexts caused by categorial imperfections or syntactic bindings whose possible inputs cannot determine a truth value, and various solutions in the beginning of analytic philosophy (including that of Russell, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Quine) would be to eliminate the opacity trapped by intensional identifications.Codes encapsulating content not directly extensional and quantifiable would be decrypted.This has not prevented the spread of intensional logics since the beginning of the twentieth century, which include such a solution: "a treatment of incomplete thoughts as complete thoughts; the rejection of the one-sorted semantics; an internalization of sense, notably in epistemic logic where the truth-conditions of beliefs are specified" (SCHANG, 2016, p. 164).
Our aim in this article is not a detailed examination of these logics, but a reading of Frege's own theory that is compatible with an epistemic approach to explaining the (propositional) content of statements.That is, we will take Frege's tactical position as an attempt to pay attention to the cognitive aspect of the Sense dimension.This reading of Frege's theory of meaning was taken up by theories of two-dimensionality in the second half of the twentieth century.
Robert Stalnaker, to quote one of the clearest among these proponents, defines intensional content as information content and argues that this information constrains the representation of a priori semantic consensus in different ways determinable by a two-dimensional framework: "one can define the informational content that results from taking the two arguments of the two-Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 dimensional intension to be the same: fA(x) = f(x, x)" (STALNAKER, 2007, p.

256).
Stalnaker makes it possible that the question about how it is that the sentence used to make the statement that Hesperus is Phosphorus manages to convey that information is transformed into the question about "what the world is like according to a person who believes that the statement is false" (STALNAKER, 2007, p. 260).So we take an epistemic position on the modal content, with the further condition that the modal content can be regarded as possible knowledge only if there is a rational strategy to encode it according to a semantic parameter that can be adopted in a multilateral debate about that content -which includes the possibility that the modal proposition is false, true, or problematic in more than one determinable way, depending on whether it depends on more or fewer scenarios (possible worlds) to be true.

INTUITIONS
We will now turn to Kant and his theory of judgment.To do this, we must first explain his theory of the objective unity of representations in a judgment, which is contained in the Transcendental Deduction of Categories in the second chapter of the Transcendental Analytics, in the Critique of Pure Reason.The core of the thesis of the Transcendental Deduction (KrV) is that we are able to spontaneously order representations while binding them to rules.
But before introducing it, Kant offers an underappreciated and important objection: "I have never been able to satisfy myself with the explanation that the logicians give of a judgment in general: it is, they say, representation of a relation between two concepts" (KrV 141).
The discomfort is explained by the premise of our article: that Kant, like Frege, did not have a formalistic and empty conception of logic.For Kant: "I remark only that it is not here determined wherein this relation consists" (KrV 141) It is important to note here that knowing 'that p' is not just knowing the form of the connection between the terms expressed in p, which explains Kant's discomfort.The author acknowledges that the signs used to support a connection between 'body' and 'weight' can be any signs, and the syntax of that connection can be as subjective as the psychological connection between the time someone wakes up and their willingness to say 'the body is heavy'.Kant argues that for any representation to be a valid cognition at all, this possibility must be representable by a "unity of apperception".This is the ultimate normative court of our self-consciousness: "There are, however, three original sources (capacities or faculties of the soul), which contain the conditions of the possibility of all experience, namely sense, imagination, apperception" (A 95/ B 127). "A manifold that is contained in an intuition that I call mine is represented as belonging to the necessary unity of self-consciousness through the synthesis of the understanding, this takes place by means of the category" (KrV B 141).This applies not only to the recognition of large parts of sentences, whole sentences, etc., but also to sensations that have reached a minimal cognitive status and can therefore be judged (apperceptively represented).The faculty of apperception marks the entrance of a prescriptive concept for thinking or conceptualizing the relation between the representation and its object.
The question is: how is this normative prohibition to be understood from the theoretical point of view?That is, how can we theoretically identify this knowledge in an account?Kant speaks of the unity of the representation of the knowledge: "a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception."(KrV B 141) The synthetic unity of apperception expresses the theoretical domain of knowledge about what "I know" when I know how to defend a propositional content by relating it to its conceptual system or the categories that underlie it.Thus, asking me if I "know" the meaning of 'p' tests my claim to recognize p's Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 assertive role.This test also serves to determine whether I know the conceptual limits of my assertions, through a conceptual scheme.When we judge "that p", we thus strategically establish a normative limit.As long as this is based on only a theoretical strategy that aims for a stable system in which a truth sentence cannot be overridden by a false consequence, the stabilization of this knowledge is meant to be described as a knowledge of "meaning" (validity), rather than a quid facti (or psychological) question.For Kant, it is an awareness of how I came to Deduct this knowledge in a self-reflexive representation, as something I have a right to, i.e., as a knowledge claim I can normatively justify.
KANT AND FREGE ON JUDGMENT, CONTENT AND RECOGNITION OF IDENTITY One of the most frequently quoted passages from Frege's work, although not particularly enlightening, is found in Sinn und Bedeutung (1892Bedeutung ( /1948)), where he directly addresses the subject of judgment: "A judgment for me is not the mere apprehension of a thought, but the recognition of its truth" (1948, p. 216).But Frege already distinguished in the Begriffsschrift (1879) between a thought (Gedanke) and a judgment (Urteil), which is a recognition of the truth of a thought.
He held that intuition cannot be the content that represents logical insight, but unlike the pure extensionalists, an objective representation of the assessable content must be uncovered if we are not to be blind to meaningful, if not extensional representable, mediating possibilities.Frege's anti-intuitionism serves a strategic purpose without dismissing the problem for which intuitions served as a solution: determining the epistemic content that guides reasoning in a judgment.To speak in Frege's words, in Boole's Logical Calculus: In the preface of my Begriffsschrift I already said that the restriction to single rule of inference which I there laid down was to be dropped in later developments.This is achieved by converting what was expressed as a Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 judgement in a formula into a rule of inference.(…) in any judgement you may replace one symbol by another, if you add as a condition the equation between the two.(FREGE, 1979, p. 29) We can draw a parallel between this concept and Frege's recurring idea of fruitful definitions.According to Frege, a definition should play a role in a conceptual approach aimed at safeguarding the boundaries of assertible contents.
As Frege repeatedly claimed the definition must be operative in proofs of significant theorems in the field.This is a sign of the definition's analyzing the content "at its real joints", where the structure and order of dependencies in the field concerned, and connections between propositions and concepts within it are manifest.(BAR-ELLI, 2014, p. 11) In this framework, the "meaning" ascribed by the definition is the intentional-theoretical object of a second-level theoretical knowledge, namely, the knowledge required to defend the truth of p within a theory/language, i.e., not just formally in non-interpretive systems, but as a theoretical foundation describing a set of reasons for avoiding the false consequences of p.The correlation between this meaning-theoretical framework of definitions and Kant's theory of the unity of apperception and the idea that we acquire the ability to make judgments by relating propositions to the system of categories that sustains their truth is not without purpose.
According to Kant, representative cognition in a judgment involves the synthesis of unity.The theory of syntheses involves the author taking a position on cognitions based on content and not on mere logical distinction: "the difference between an indistinct and a distinct representation is merely logical, and does not concern the content" (KrV A 44/B 61).For him, the main characteristic of our cognition of identity between spatio-temporally disconnected events is the ability to represent it in intuition, but not just any intuition, but rather one that presents itself in a synthesis of contents compatible with the form of its space-time structure.For Kant, this form is what underlies Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 the cognition of geometrical concepts: "you must therefore give your object a priori in intuition, and ground your synthetic proposition on this" (KrV A 49 B 66).This synthesis can be further refined through the application of rules and categories, resulting in a higher level of compatibility between content.The content of the conceptual identity expressed in the judgment is determined by these rules and categories.
the criterion of the possibility of a concept (not of its object) is the definition, in which the unity of the concept, the truth of everything may initially be derived from it, and finally the completenes of everything that is drawn from it, constitute everything that is necessary for the production of the entire concept.(KrV B 115) Frege's theory of the second dimension of meaning (Sinn), in turn, does not contain theories about the mind and self-consciousness, but also implies a theoretical framework for explaining a richer identity content, which can be characterized (as by Stalnaker) as an information content whose contingency can be semantically encoded -as a non-contingent (psychologistic) knowledgethrough second-order semantic techniques: This point is specially clear if we individuate propositions in terms of a possible worlds analysis, as does Robert Stalnaker.The content of what a child believes can be captured in terms of the range of possibilities, or the possible worlds, that the child envisages.This set of alternative possibilities will doubtlessly grow as the child matures, and then he will have another belief content associated with the same English sentence.(GOLDMAN, 1986, p. 168) This helps us to envision a dynamic description of the belief formation process that enriches or specifies the attribution of extensions to the internal consistency of the belief system: "content plus a possible world (or "circumstance of evaluation") determines an extension (in the case of a sentence, a truth value)" (STALNAKER, 2007, p. 256).
This thesis is consistent with the neo-Kantian "assumption that there had to be a level of meaning for all expressions to which speakers had a priori access" (STALNAKER, 2007, p. 257).That a priori knowledge is understood as the capacity to determine the boundaries of theoretical knowledge by representing its conceptual unity.This condition was described by Dummett in inferentialist terms as the condition of harmony: "we require a harmony which obtains only if a statement that has been indirectly established always could (in some sense of 'could') have been established directly" (DUMMETT, 1975, p. 227).Our theoretical and hypothetical knowledge should not go beyond the limitations imposed by our categories or second-order concepts.In other words, our cognitive material should be compatible with the information used to provide inductive congruence for a projection or theoretical explanation.In this context, both Kantian and Fregean philosophies align against the same target, as they both offer theories about the type of cognition and conceptual foundations involved in understanding the mediation of a conclusion.

In this reading, both Frege and Kant ally themselves against a blind
version of what a logical representation is.What provides an objective epistemic dimension to the basis of our proofs is not blind knowledge of a logical form that represents the explicitation of presuppositions and rules of inference.This agreement of both authors to a problematization of the conditions for the cognition of mediated content is in line with the milestones of modern inferentialism (BRANDOM, 1994;DUMMETT, 1991).

THE LINGUISTIC TURN AND ITS OVERTURN
The solution to the problem of non-trivial encoded identities is one way to answer the old question: How are synthetic judgments a priori possible?
Frege did not need the synthetic part, however, because his theory was based on the hope that it would be possible to recognize analytically the higher-order content of arithmetical propositions.But the author never failed to recognize Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 the presence of additional cognitive contents acting in the composition of a justification.The similarities are so great that they justify the position of Gilead Bar-Elli: the important point to note is that Frege's view of arithmetic also requires such a capacity, in spite of his rejecting what he took to be Kant's view that it depends on sensibility-whether empirical or pure.In a wide sense of "intuition" as a capacity of recognizing objects (without the restriction to sensibility) it therefore requires intuition.Frege devoted much space and effort to establishing that numbers are objects, and he regarded the question of how logical objects (in particular, numbers) are given to us as central to [the philosophy of] arithmetic.Sure enough, a crucial thesis of Frege's is that objects (e.g.numbers) can be given us by logic and reason, independently of sensation and space and time.And yet, as stated above, a general capacity to recognize objects and ways they are given to us is required by Frege's conception of the objectivity of logic and arithmetic.Whether this cognitive ability to recognize objects is called "intuition" or not is of lesser importance (BAR-ELLI, 2014, p. 6).
Kant's approach and Frege's exhibit both similarities and differences.
One notable similarity lies in their recognition of a problem.Both philosophers held a non-associationist perspective on the connection between contents.The conceptual induction proposed by Frege enables the creation of proofs that do not rely on empirical relations, resembling Kant's pursuit of identifying synthetic judgments that are not limited to a posteriori cognition.However, a significant disparity arises when it comes to their views on the use of phenomenological and psychological concepts to describe the cognitive relationship of logical and arithmetical knowledge: In fact, at least in Frege's eyes, the differences are so significant that, as we shall see in the sequel, Frege explicitly says in The Foundations of Arithmetic (FA) that by Kant's notions of analytic and synthetic, arithmetic should be deemed synthetic!(BAR-ELLI, 2014, p. 1) Frege expressed apprehension towards such concepts, perceiving them as a potential degradation of logic.This led the author to be popular among Platonists and philosophers of language focused on mathematical determinations of linguistic composition, moving him away from the continental epistemological tradition of Kantian origin.The history of philosophy in the twentieth century teaches, however, that Frege's intervention carried epistemological reflection away from epistemology, due to the better position of language to be studied in its structure than the mind acts of cognition, Dummett demonstrates: The importance of the denial of the mental character of thoughts, common to Bolzano, Frege, Meinong and Husserl, did not lie in the philosophical mythology to which it gave rise -Frege's myth of the "third real" and Husserl's of "ideal being".It lay rather in the anti-psychological direction given to the analysis of concepts and of propositions (…).One in this position has therefore to look about him [Frege] to find something nonmythological but objective and external to the individual mind to embody the thoughts which the individual subject grasps and may assent to or reject.Where better to find it than in the institution of a common language?(DUMMETT, 1996, p. 25) However, the conditions that led to this shift or turn to language are no longer the same.There is a dividing event that justifies the need to recover the similarities between Kant and Frege, to place them on the same side in the debate.The study of language had advantages that are not so clear today.When the first analytical paraphrasing techniques emerged, they spread throughout the professional universe as a persistent habit capable of resolving old philosophical disputes and one, in particular, was the mentalist or phenomenological dispute about necessary truth and its relationship with subjective certainty.The work of Russell (1905), Wittgenstein (1921), Ryle (1932), among others, made it possible to syntactically determine the difference between an always true or always false logical form and a sometimes true one, giving objective and observable determination to the distinction between necessary and contingent content.With this it was also possible to distinguish the analytical and synthetic parts of our propositional blocks without appealing to any mental activity, representation of epistemic certainty or intensional Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 notion.The syntax of languages itself makes it possible to identify the logical extension of terms, and in recalcitrant cases, such as those in which there may be ambiguity of scope (like the difference between k* "The King of France does not exist" -which is true -and k** "The King of France is not bald" -which seems meaningless at first), a quantificational paraphrase helps to identify the distinct "content" of k* and k** and assign it to different hidden logical forms: "The ambiguity as between primary and secondary occurrences is hard to avoid in language ; but it does no harm if we are on our guard against it.In symbolic logic it is of course easily avoided" (RUSSELL, 1905, p. 489).
In our view, this is the key to a full appreciation of the moment when Kantian scholars phenomenologically oriented loses sight of Frege and the latter becomes the motor of a tradition of philosophical reading and study that focuses less and less on the mind and cognition and more on the structure of language.However, the conditions that led to this division of perspectives gradually disappeared.In the second half of the twentieth century, the subject of language systematically solicited the help of epistemologies until the priority of the former over the latter was no longer so dominant.The irony is that the same course of events led to an author who, out of religious coherence with the principles of linguistic extensionalism, decreed the end or the unnecessity of the very content of the theoretical divergence between synthetic and analytic 1 .W. O. Quine wrote his famous article (Two Dogmas of Empiricism) in 1951(1953), in which he summarized the culmination of his discussions with Carnap, which marked a point of no return for the belief in the reforms of language as the observable asset of a theory of logical necessity: 1 Without a theoretical determination, the distinction ends up becoming artificial and intradomestic, dependent on the history of the holistic connections of a language and the theoretical terms chosen in a scientific paradigm: "if we recognize with Duhem that theoretic sentences have their evidence not as singles sentences but only as larger blocks of theory, then the indeterminacy of translation of theoretical sentences is a natural conclusion" (QUINE, 1969, p. 80-1).
Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 It is often hinted that the difficulty in separating analytic statements from synthetic ones in ordinary language is due to die vagueness of ordinary language and that the distinction is clear when we have a precise artificial language with explicit "semantical rules."This, however, as I shall now attempt to show, is a confusion.(QUINE, 1953, p. 289) An analysis of language will not explain content determinations because linguistic categories do not go beyond mere extensional determination: "meanings themselves, as obscure intemediary entities, may well be abandoned" (QUINE, 1953, p. 282).Everything there is to know about this content, therefore, is exhausted in its extension, and fixing properties -such as Sense or synonym -to identify this content will not improve our theoretical ability to recognize it.The way we supplement language with high-level theoretical identities, such as synonyms, depends precisely on specifications of the extension of concepts, and so we never gain explanatory content when we move from extensions to intensions.This, obviously, does not increase our security of knowing what we are doing when we recognize content as the same: There is no assurance here that the extensional agreement of 'bachelor' and 'unmarried man' rests on meaning rather than merely on accidental matters of fact, as does the extensional agreement of 'creature with a heart' and creature with kidneys' (QUINE, 1953, p. 288).
Quine's considerations do not argue against the philosophy of language, but they undermine the belief that language -whether reformed or not -could provide a basis for substantive distinctions that the mere structure of mentalsubjective categories cannot provide.Language fails as much as the mind.If there was a philosophical step made by the philosophy of language, it consisted in the fact that it destroyed our belief in stable determinations between meaning and nonsense and, at best -if we do not venture into translations -can determine communicative content for certain purposes.This only ruined the philosophy of language for those foundationalists who believed they could make solid Fregean distinctions between sense and Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 reference or analytic and synthetic through syntactic considerations.The group of skeptics did not suffer from this defeat.For them, this was the expected escalation of the appeal to language: a systematic destruction of any security in recognizing content.Even our notion of analyticity and our theories about synonymy would lose stability.This trapped the first group.Either they accepted assimilation to skepticism, or they had to outline a return to the Fregean pillars of recognizing the logical content of second-order concepts and the extra-extensional notion of Meaning: Sense.
Dummett is one of those responsible for rescuing a sense in which Frege -despite his inveterate anti-psychologism -can remain prominent in this new stage of analytical investigation: An advance in logic is therefore also an advance in philosophy of thought; and the advance first achieved by Frege was immense.It was difficult to achieve because it involved refusing to be guided by the surface forms of sentences.Frege regarded his notation of quantifiers and variables less as a means of analysing language as we have it than a device for replacing it by a symbolism better designed for carrying out rigorous deductive reasoning.(DUMMETT, 1991, p. 2) However, the decision to salvage the roots of Frege's enterprise reveals precisely the end of the incompatibility conditions between the Fregean and Kantian frameworks.Since the categories of language and syntax no longer have primacy in the study of logical distinctions, it is no longer taboo within analytic philosophy to idealize the conditions of rationality in the cognitive processes of inference, which led to a new phase in analytic philosophy: "recent work within the analytical tradition, for the late Gareth Evans onwards, has tended to reverse the explanatory priority which that tradition has historically to language over thought" (DUMMETT, in: HUSSERL, 2001, xviii).
Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 CONCLUSION Both Kant and Frege focus on the knowledge acquired when one comprehends meanings, i.e., when the cognition of the relationship between contents is supported by a thought/concept that defines intensional relationships capable of carrying fruitfull non-trivial definitions and identities.Despite the divergences between Frege and Kant regarding the techniques and methods used in conceptualizing enriched identities, particularly evident in Frege's innovative understanding of analyticity and his rejection of an a priori of synthesis in mathematics, these two authors actually share more common ground than disagreements.They both reject skepticism and antifoundationalism when it comes to the epistemic content of empirical and logical knowledge.However, this agreement is only partial, and its significance in the academic realm depends on the specific type of alliance one aims to establish within the realm of debate.This article argues that the alliances formed against content skepticism, influenced by Quine's intensional skepticism, have had a greater impact than the previous anti-mentalist and anti-metaphysical alliances of earlier logical positivists and analytical philosophers.
Language, which was initially seen as a more stable and observable stone than mental-phenomenological structures, began to be seen as a malleable instrument and susceptible to unpredictable categorical extensions as its capacity to unlock linguistic knowledge of analyticity was deemed by Quine as a non-explanatory step, but a mere arbitrary decision in the selection of consistent interpretation hypotheses.After Quine, language was seen as an unstable, strictly domestic interpretative instrument whose holistic coherence could only relatively and partially justify differences between verificatory and theoretical content -dependent on conventions and arbitrary decisions about an indefinite range of interpretative options.Thus the whole sector friendly to foundationalism had to switch sides and look again for old strong intentional content and intensional demarcations of content in the hope of resisting Geltung, vol.2, n. 2, 2022 skepticism.This circumstance helped to reveal the conditions under which Frege's theory was not incompatible with that of Kant.This article argues that the development of certain themes in the twentieth century has resulted in a significant shift, which positions Frege and Kant as allies.This change takes place at the moment when the era of antipsychologism comes to an end and analytic philosophy begins to systematically explore the concept of assertion and assessable mental content.
As the first pillars of analytic philosophy crumbled, calling into question the holistic coherence of language that justified a strict separation between analytic and synthetic and between verificatory and theoretical content, those who still had hope of resisting skepticism had to turn back: to theories of the nature and properties of mind and intentional unity.This, of course, opened the way for less linguistic theories about the intentional identity of propositional content and the possibilities of rationalizing the interpretative position of members of a linguistic community.We thus return to a time when Frege has more grounds for alliance than for opposition to Kant.
Frege's Intensional theory of content (Sinn) and assertion, and Kant's theory of apperception and synthetic intentionality (synthetic a priori judgments), are on the same side in this new distribution of the debate arena.
The collision between the foundations of an analytic and a phenomenological philosophy appears to have become jointly empty as the conditions that caused the clash between Frege's theory of analyticity and Kant's theory of a priori syntheses gradually lose significance.Once the appeal to language as an objective source of content distinctions loses strength, a theory of judgment and of intentional identification is once again present in reflections on content determinations.The general conditions under which the theory of second-order quantification, used by Frege to justify mathematical inductive projections, replaced a theory of identification syntheses (Kant, Husserl) no longer exist in the same form as when Frege wrote, and the analytic debate has so far surpassed the need for this replacement.