The Laws of Thought and the Power of Thinking

Abstract

Frege taught us to strictly distinguish between the logical and the psychological. This doctrine has deeply influenced the analytic tradition in the philosophy of mind, language and logic. And it was praised, of course, by Wittgenstein, early and late. On closer inspection, however, the way in which Frege frames his anti-psychologism opens a crack in his system that appears in several places. I want to suggest that Wittgenstein's so called ‘rule-following considerations” address this difficulty and are intended to show that the ‘crack’ eventually brings down the whole edifice and with it this way of framing the celebrated distinction between the logical and the psychological. The investigation of how the rule-following paradox arises within Frege sheds, I think, light on the systematic difficulty and brings out the fact that the solutions that have been proposed in the literature don't get to the root of the problem.