THE CONCEPTHORSEIS A CONCEPT

Abstract

AbstractI offer an analysis of the sentence ‘the concepthorseis a concept’. It will be argued that the grammatical subject of this sentence, ‘the concepthorse’, indeed refers to a concept, and not to an object, as Frege once held. The argument is based on a criterion of proper-namehood according to which an expression is a proper name if it is so rendered in Frege’s ideography. The predicate ‘is a concept’, on the other hand, should not be thought of as referring to a function. It will be argued that the analysis of sentences of the form ‘Cis a concept’ requires the introduction of a new form of statement. Such statements are not to be thought of as having function–argument form, but rather the structure subject–copula–predicate.