On Frege’s Assimilation of Sentences with Names*

Abstract

Abstract I shall discuss some of the issues concerning a notorious doctrine of Frege that sentences are names of truth-values. I am interested in a problem raised by Kripke that the doctrine obscures the distinction between judgeable and unjudgeable contents. I shall present what I take to be Frege’s account of judgeable content: a proper expression of a judgeable content is susceptible to an analysis into a predicate and an argument-word, where a predicate is understood as a concept-word used to attribute a certain property to the referent of the argument-word. In the light of this analysis, I shall argue that the doctrine does not obscure the distinction. The problem will also be discussed within the formal context of Grundgesetze. A new light will be shed on his rather peculiar conception of the symbol ‘ ${\boldsymbol \vdash}$’.