Frege on Judgement and the Judging

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Agent
Maria van der Schaar
Leiden University
[email protected]

How is Frege able to claim that the notion of judgement is essential to his logic
without introducing a form of psychologism? I argue first that Frege’s logical
notion of judgement is to be distinguished from an empirical notion of judgement,
that it cannot be understood as an abstract, idealized notion, and that there are
doubts concerning a transcendental reading of Frege’s writings. Then, I explain that
the logical notion of judgement has to be understood from a first-person perspec-
tive, to be contrasted with a third-person perspective, in which judgement is under-
stood as an empirical, psychological phenomenon. Frege’s logic is essentially a first-
person engagement, as each of us can make use of the ideography as a science of
logic only if we ourselves have made the relevant judgements. Finally, I claim that
the judging agent as conceived by Frege can, after all, be understood as a trans-
cendental ego.

Introduction
Inspired by discussions with Wittgenstein, Philip E.B. Jourdain sent a
letter to Frege in which he asked ‘whether you now regard assertion
(£) as merely psychological’ (15.1.1914, WB, p. 126). Answering
Jourdain, Frege writes in a draft letter that,
judging (acknowledging as true) is certainly an inner mental process; but
that something is true is independent of the knowing agent, is objective.1
However, a bit further on, Frege writes:
If one were to delete the judgement stroke from the premise sentences in
the presentation of an inference in my ideography, something essential
would be missing.2
On the one hand, it seems that the act of judging is a mental act,
depending on the judging agent, and thereby a psychological notion;
1
(WB, p. 126). Translations are mine, unless indicated otherwise.
2
‘Wenn man bei der Darstellung eines Schlusses in meiner Begriffsschrift die Urteilsstriche
bei den Praemissensätzen wegliesse, fehlte etwas wesentliches’ (WB, p. 127). Translating
‘Schluss’ by ‘inference’ may be misleading as the term ‘inference’ is now often understood
in a non-epistemic sense. See below.

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226 Maria van der Schaar

on the other hand, the judgement stroke, the sign that a judgement
has been made, is essential to Frege’s logic. Is Frege able to defend the
thesis that judgement is essential to logic, but that logic is independent
of psychology nonetheless?
I defend the thesis that the distinction between an empirical and a

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logical notion of judgement is crucial to understanding the judgement
stroke in Frege’s logic. This claim holds for all periods we may distin-
guish in Frege’s writings, since the judgement stroke is part of his logic
throughout those writings, although there is a development in the way
he elucidates the notion of a judgemental act. From around 1890, when
the distinction between Sinn and Bedeutung is in place, Frege under-
stands judging as the acknowledging of the truth of a Thought
(Gedanke), and I take this elucidation to be central to his writings.3
I argue that the logical notion of judgement is not to be identified
with the empirical notion of judgement (§1). Furthermore, one can
raise doubts concerning a transcendental understanding of the notion
(§2); and against an abstract, Platonic understanding, as well (§3). In
the final section (§4), I explain that the logical notion of judgement is
to be understood from a first-person perspective, whereas the empir-
ical notion of judgement is to be understood from a third-person
perspective. Readers of Frege have noted certain tensions in his writ-
ings. Armed with the distinction between a first- and a third-person
perspective, we may view these apparent tensions in a different light.
Finally, I claim that the judging agent can be understood as a tran-
scendental ego. This raises the question as to how one can explain that
the judgements in Frege’s ideography are fallible, which I discuss at
the end of the paper.
A modern reader, immersed in a model-theoretic account of logic,
may find it odd and old-fashioned that Frege gives a prominent place
to the notion of judgement in his logic. Although modern logic finds
its origin in Frege’s logic, his idea of logic essentially differs from a
model-theoretic account. The latter is shaped rather by Hilbert’s view
3
Before he made the distinction, when he was speaking of a judgeable content rather than
a Thought, Frege already elucidated judging as acknowledging something as true. Compare
Frege (1882, p. 58) and Frege (1879-1891, pp. 7-8, written in the early 80s, cf. Hovens 1997). In a
lecture of 1882, Frege says that if I want to assert a content as right, I put the judgement stroke
at the left end of the content stroke (Frege 1883, p. 101). Frege’s statement in the Begriffschrift
that all judgements are characterized by the predicate ‘is a fact’ should not be taken in a literal
sense, as he immediately adds: ‘We see that there cannot be any question here of subject and
predicate in the ordinary sense’ (Bs, §3). The judgement stroke is not a predicate in the
Begriffsschrift: it has no conceptual content (begrifflicher Inhalt), and it has a unique syntax;
for example, we are not allowed to put a negation sign in front of the judgement stroke.

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 227

of logic and his notion of an axiom as a non-epistemic starting-point.

For Hilbert, as soon as an axiom system is consistent, it specifies a
class of models. Hilbert’s view that formal systems are objects of study
for meta-mathematical research, and his thesis that meanings can ar-
bitrarily be given to formal systems and their axioms, have had a

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pervasive influence on the model-theoretic tradition. Because logic
thus becomes a mere calculus, to which an endless variety of inter-
pretations can be given, syntax takes priority over semantics. However,
for Frege, the sentences of the Begriffsschrift have a meaning right from
the start. It makes no sense to speak of a sentence without meaning.
Whereas on the model-theoretic account truth comes in at the level of
the meta-language, and has the role of a predicate, for Frege, the
logical role of truth cannot be captured by a predicate, and certainly
not by a meta-linguistic predicate. On Frege’s view of logic, we do not
need a meta-theoretical perspective from which proofs of consistency
of the logical system will be given. The fact that our axioms are true
guarantees that no inconsistency will arise. Or, to put it the other way
around, if an inconsistency is found, one of the assertions in which a
Thought is acknowledged as an axiom should be withdrawn, it being
presupposed that nothing is wrong with the inference rules. Hilbert’s
view was reinforced by the success of logical positivism. Carnap’s idea
of logical tolerance in logic, according to which axioms and inference
rules can be chosen arbitrarily, and Schlick’s critique of the traditional
notion of an axiom as requiring the notion of self-evidence, seem to
have given a definite blow to the idea of logic Frege stands for.
However, as important as a model-theoretic account of logic has
been in the twentieth century, the philosophical assumptions on
which it is based are not unproblematic. In order to function in an
account of reasoning, a formal system needs to be acknowledged as
correct by the reasoning agent. Premises and conclusions in reasoning
are judgements rather than propositions. Where proposition is a non-
epistemic notion, to be explained, for example, in terms of possible
worlds, we cannot understand what judgement is without bringing in
the notion of a judging agent. In our reasoning, the conclusion is
drawn from the premises by an act of inference. Inference in this
sense is agent-dependent too. Logic as the study of inferences has to
be epistemic right from the start. The act of inference needs to bring
us to known truths, given that the premises are known. And it can
only be knowledge-preserving in this sense if it is itself an epistemic
act.

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228 Maria van der Schaar

According to Frege’s mature writings, in every act of inference the

premises should be known, thereby bringing us to a known conclu-
sion: all acts of inference are part of an act of demonstration in his
ideography. Frege does not make a distinction between demonstration
and inference, though it is agreed that he should have done so. For we

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have to make allowance for inferences drawn from assumptions. An
act is an act of demonstration only if the premises are actually known.
By contrast, an act of inference is knowledge-preserving, but even so it
may not yield knowledge. Notwithstanding this identification of in-
ference and demonstration, Frege’s notion of inference is still of value.
As Göran Sundholm has pointed out, Frege’s notion of inference,
holding among judgements, should not be understood in terms of
logical consequence, which holds among non-epistemic propositions,
but as standing in a tradition in which logic is primarily used in
demonstrations (Sundholm 2012, pp. 944, 945; cf. Sundholm 2009).
In this tradition, the act of inference plays a central role. This idea of
logic and inference is not only of historical importance. It plays, for
example, an important role in Constructive Type Theory as found in
the writings of Per Martin-Löf.4 Frege’s thesis that judgement is es-
sential to logic, far from being odd and old-fashioned, makes it pos-
sible to understand how logic is to be connected to the notion of
judgement and the judging agent.

1. Judgement in logic is not an empirical notion

When studying the act of judgement, one may distinguish two differ-
ent points of view: one may study judgement from an empirical or
from a logical point of view. From an empirical point of view, one
understands judgement as an event in the world, to be represented by
a predicate. Describing what John does, one may say ‘John judges that
snow is white’. Judging is here understood as a relation obtaining
between John and the thought that snow is white. The sentence can
thus be represented as Jab, where Jxy stands for the relation x judges y,
a stands for John and b stands for the thought that snow is white. Here,
judging is expressed by a two-place predicate; it is conceived as a dual
relation. The idea that judging is a dual relation has been very influ-
ential in theories of propositional attitude ascriptions. The term
4
In Schaar (2011) I explain in what sense the notion of a judgemental act is of importance
for Constructive Type Theory, and why the first-person perspective ought not to be neglected
in logic.

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 229

‘propositional attitude’ was introduced by Russell in 1918, referring to

a theory of judgement he himself had defended earlier.5 On this ac-
count, judging is one of the propositional attitudes or acts, on a par
with assuming and wishing. In his analysis of 1918, Russell seems to
refer to the notion of psychological assertion present in The Principles

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of Mathematics.6 According to that view, a proposition may be merely
thought of, or it may be the object of judgement and assertion. In a
study on Meinong dating from 1904, it becomes clear that on the
account of judgement as a dual relation, propositions have only a
contingent relation to truth: ‘some propositions are true and some
false, just as some roses are red and some white’ (Russell 1904, p. 75).
The psychological, empirical notion of judgement is thus analysed
as Jab, and it is this analysis that Russell criticises after 1905. By that
time, he no longer considers the that-clause to be a semantic unity, for
there is no propositional object for which the that-clause would stand,
as Russell now claims. Instead, he considers judging to be a multiple
relation between a judging agent, and the terms involved. Othello’s
judgement that Desdemona loves Cassio is represented as Jabcd, where
a stands for Othello, b for Desdemona, c for loving as term, and d for
Cassio. As different as the two accounts may be, they agree in con-
sidering judging to be a relation, an event in the world. We are analys-
ing the judgement of John or Othello, and thus analyse these
judgements from a third-person, external point of view. The case in
which the judging subject is denoted by the first-person pronoun ‘I’ is
only an accidental case. The unique character of judgement that is to
be captured by the judgement stroke, or the assertion sign in Russell’s
case, is missing in this explanation of judgement. If one attributes a
judgement to Othello by means of the predicate letter J, one is still in
need of a special sign of judgemental force showing that the predicate
Jxbcd is actually attributed to Othello. If one understands the act of
judging as a relation, one treats it as an event in the world to be
expressed by a predicate, that is, by a function expression. There
5
Russell (1918, p. 227). In fact, Russell uses ‘propositional verbs’ as a common name for
‘believe’, ‘wish’, and so on, adding that ‘you might call them “attitudes”’, where ‘them’ refers
to the verbs. Strictly speaking, however, ‘attitudes’ does not refer to the verbs, but to what they
stand for.
6
Russell (1903, §52 and §478). Besides this psychological notion of assertion, Russell ac-
knowledges a logical notion of assertion. The latter is of interest, as it has an internal relation
to truth. Russell identifies logical assertions with true propositions; cf. (idem, §§478-9). This
position is problematic, as Russell himself realized (idem, §38), since the antecedents of hypo-
thetical judgements are not asserted, although they may be true. This point will play a role in
the section on Tyler Burge’s interpretation of Frege below.

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230 Maria van der Schaar

seems to be no place for a normative notion of truth on this account;

judging is just one of the events in the world, an object of study for
psychology and philosophy of mind. The empirical notion of judge-
ment is not essential to logic, at least on the non-psychological ac-
count of logic Frege is aiming at. In order to understand the role

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judgement plays in Frege’s logic we need an analysis of judgement
from a logical point of view, an analysis in which the relation between
judgement and truth is elucidated. We need to analyse the act of
judgement itself, not attributions of judgement to others. As David
Bell has put it, ‘it is to direct discourse, and not to oratio obliqua, that
one must look for the key to the nature of human judgement’ (Bell
1979, p. 7).
Recently, Mark Textor has pointed out that judgement is, for Frege,
not one of the propositional attitudes. As Wolfgang Künne puts
it, judgement is not an act directed to a proposition (Künne 2003,
p. 260). We do not judge a propositional object; we judge a propos-
ition to be true. According to Textor, Frege’s notion of judgement is
not that of a dual relation; it is rather a three-place relation between a
Thought, a thinker and a truth-value (Textor 2010, p. 647). Textor’s
main thesis is that for Frege, judging is a ‘special case of acknowl-
edging the reference of an expression, namely the reference of an
assertoric sentence’ (Textor 2010, p. 629). This interpretation is con-
firmed by Frege’s repeated elucidation of judging as acknowledging
the truth of a Thought (SB, p. 34, n. 7; Frege 1918, p. 62). According to
Textor, this means that judgement is a species of ontic acknowledge-
ment (Textor 2010, p. 641). Acknowledging in its ontic use is a non-
propositional attitude; it consists in accepting an object or a kind of
object. Just as one may acknowledge non-real numbers in one’s ontol-
ogy, one may acknowledge the truth of a Thought. The act of
acknowledging is, on Textor’s reading, factive: one can only acknow-
ledge what is there. One can acknowledge the truth of a Thought only
if the Thought is true.
Textor’s reading of Frege is to be credited insofar as he understands
that for Frege judging is not a dual relation. Judging is not simply a
relation between a judging subject and a propositional object.
Furthermore, Textor understands that, for Frege, the notion of judge-
ment has a special relation to truth. However, Textor’s interpretation
contains some problems. According to Textor, judging is a ‘mental
relation between a thinker, a thought, and an object, namely a truth-
value’ (idem, p. 615, abstract; emphasis added). If a particular judging,
say, that snow is white, is a relation between a subject, a Thought, and

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 231

a truth-value, as Textor claims, it should be represented as Jabc, where

Jxyz stands for the relation x judges y to refer to z, a stands for John, b
stands for the Thought that snow is white, and c stands for the True.
However, the notion of judgement that is essential to Frege’s logic is
not a relation, for, on Frege’s account, relations are to be represented

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by a predicate, whereas the act of judgement is not to be represented
this way. Predicates are used to describe what happens in the world,
but the act of judging that is essential to logic is not an event in the
world among other events.
Frege thus needs a logical notion of judgement, to be distinguished
from judgement as empirical phenomenon. If, with Textor, one
understands judgement as a mental relation, one misses an under-
standing of the role of the judgement stroke. The judgement stroke is
a sign that differs essentially from words that are used to describe or
express a content. It is used to show, rather than describe, that a
judgement has been made; it is a pragmatic sign of judgemental or
assertive force (cf. Bell 1979, pp. 97-8). By using the judgement stroke
in his logic, Frege goes beyond semantics. Although natural language
does not have a special sign for assertive force and the assertive force
is often taken to be represented by the predicate, in logic the assertive
force has to be separated from the predicate, as Frege puts it in ‘What
may I regard as the result of my work?’ (NS, p. 200; PW, p. 184). If
one were to express the judgemental force by a predicate, one would
miss the essence of Frege’s logic. The judgement stroke is a sign of its
own special kind (GG, §26, p. 44). In its primordial, logical sense,
judgement is an act that cannot be represented in any ordinary sense
of that term. Since we do make assertions in our logical system,
we need a special sign of assertive force (cf. Frege 1896, p. 232,
orig. p. 377).
Secondly, on Textor’s interpretation of Frege, an incorrect judge-
ment is impossible: it is impossible to acknowledge a false proposition
as true, for one can only acknowledge what is there. Textor takes this
consequence of his interpretation to be an argument for his position,
given that Frege, on Textor’s reading, does not allow for incorrect
judgements. In cases where the content is false, there may at most
be an attempt to judge the content to be true. Because ontic acknowl-
edging is factive, we cannot make an incorrect judgement. It is true
that, with respect to inference, Frege claims that one can infer only
from propositions that are rightly acknowledged to be true. If the
premises are not true, we can only speak of a pseudo-inference
(Pseudoschluss, letter to Dingler, 13.1.1917, WB, p. 30; cf. WB, p. 127).

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232 Maria van der Schaar

Frege does not seem to be that strict with respect to judgement; he

does not speak of a pseudo-judgement if one judges a false proposition
to be true.7 I will come back to the problem of incorrect judgement in
the final section.
As a third objection to Textor’s interpretation, one may say that, for

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Frege, judgement is sui generis, a kind of its own. In ‘Über Sinn und
Bedeutung’, Frege says that the act of judgement is one of a kind and
incomparable.8 The elucidations he gives of judgement are not meant
as definitions, for there is not a genus to which the logical judgement
belongs. It is precisely for this reason that judgement cannot be com-
pared to other mental acts. Although Textor acknowledges that judge-
ment is for Frege a logically primitive activity, nevertheless, by taking
judgement to be a species of the higher genus ontic acknowledgement,
he is committed to the thesis that Frege’s notion of judgement is to be
defined in terms of genus and specific difference. By contrast, ontic
acknowledgement is rather to be understood as a special kind of
judgement; acknowledging the existence of witches is judging that
the concept of witch is not an empty concept, at least on a Fregean
view. However, sometimes it seems to be correct to describe judging as
a special kind of mental act. In such cases, we are considering judge-
ment as one of the propositional attitudes, and thus as a species be-
longing to a genus. Here, however, our aim is to analyse the empirical
notion of judgement; we are not elucidating the primitive notion of
judgement that is essential to Frege’s conception of logic. If one
focuses on questions within the philosophy of mind, judging may
be understood as one mental act among others, but the importance
of judgement for logic cannot be captured this way. From a logical
point of view, judgement is a primitive, indefinable notion.

2. Judgement as a transcendental notion

If Frege’s notion of judgement is not an empirical notion, may a
transcendental interpretation of Frege’s writings help us here? Is the
logical notion of judgement involved in the question as to what be-
longs to the condition of the possibility of knowledge? Or is the
7
And when he speaks of a pseudo-assertion (Scheinbehauptung) he has something else in
mind (cf. Frege 1918, p. 63).
8
‘Das Urteilen ist eben etwas ganz Eigenartiges und Unvergleichliches’ (SB, p. 35; cf. NS,
p. 16). Although the translation of ‘ganz Eigenartig’ as ‘quite peculiar’ (Frege 1997, p. 159) is
not wrong, ‘Eigenartig’ primarily means being one of a kind, which makes more sense here.

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judging agent perhaps to be understood as a transcendental ego?

Gottfried Gabriel has rightly pointed to the Neo-Kantian background
of Frege’s logic. According to him, Frege argues for the acceptance of
basic logical laws in a transcendental way: ‘the acceptance of basic
logical laws forms the condition of the possibility of our judging’

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(Gabriel 2013, p. 289). Gabriel supports this thesis by means of a pas-
sage from the preface of the Grundgesetze (idem, p. 288), of which only
sentence (1) is quoted by him:
(1) [W]e must recognize it [a basic law such as the law of identity] if we are
not to throw our thought into confusion and in the end renounce
judgement altogether. (2) I do not wish to either dispute or endorse this
view and only remark that what we have here is not a logical implication
(Folgerung). (3) What is given is not a ground of being true, but of our
holding as true. (4a) And furthermore, this impossibility of our rejecting
the law does not prevent us from supposing that there are beings who do
reject it; (4b) but it does prevent us from supposing that these beings are
right in doing so; (4c) it also prevents us from doubting whether we or they
are right. At least this goes for me. (5) If others dare to recognize and doubt
a law in the same breath, then it seems to me like trying to jump out of
one’s own skin (aus der eignen Haut zu fahren), against which I can only
urgently warn. (Frege GG, xvii; Frege 1997, p. 204; emphasis added in the
translation)
In sentence (2), Frege makes it clear that he does not endorse the view
expressed by sentence (1). As he argues in sentence (3), the point gives
a ground merely for our holding something to be true, not for a law of
truth; it gives nothing but a psychological justification for the logical
laws. In sentence (1) Frege is presenting not his own view, but an
existing opinion (view, Meinung), most likely the position of certain
Neo-Kantians. A further argument against a transcendental reading of
the logical laws is presented in sentence (4a): as it is possible to assume
that there are beings who reject these laws, the basic laws cannot form
a condition for the possibility of any judgement. The point Frege is
making is rather that our acknowledgement of a logical law prevents
us from acknowledging that those who reject the law do so rightly
(4b). Sentence (5) does seem to support a transcendental reading.
Nevertheless, I will explain in the final section below that sentence
(5) is to be understood by means of the idea of a first-person
perspective.
The main argument, though, against a transcendental reading of
these laws is that the basic laws, and logical laws in general, are, for
Frege, descriptive laws. A basic law is a most general scientific truth,

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234 Maria van der Schaar

and such a law is not in need of a transcendental argument, because

one is, on Frege’s view, entitled to acknowledge it to be true as soon as
one understands the basic notions involved; identity is one such
notion.
However, Frege’s ideography goes beyond a mere description of lo-

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gical laws. The judgement stroke escapes a purely descriptive view of
logic. It is a sign of assertive force, and there is no assertive force
without an agent. If one understands the judgement in logic as a
non-empirical notion, the judging agent may be understood as a
non-empirical ego. Are we entitled to call the judging agent a transcen-
dental ego? If we use the term in a strict Kantian sense, in which the
transcendental ego is to account for the unity of consciousness, and for
the unity of the judgemental content as well, it seems that the tran-
scendental ego plays no role in Frege’s logic. However, we can take the
transcendental ego in a more general sense as the ego that cannot be
described by any predicate, but is needed as a presupposition for the
possibility of any ideography. Can we call the agent of judgement in a
logical sense a transcendental ego in this sense? If we do so, how can we
explain the fact that a mistake is made in Frege’s ideography as pre-
sented in the Grundgesetze? The Basic Law (V) is preceded by a judge-
ment stroke, but, as Frege came to realize, it implies a contradiction. If
the judgement stroke is a sign of judgement made by a transcendental
ego, no mistake seems to be possible. I come back to this problem at the
end of the final section.
This interpretation of Frege, in which the primitive notions of
judgement and truth cannot be captured in empirical terms, seems
to be confirmed by Wayne Martin’s reading of Frege, when he com-
pares the role that truth plays in Frege’s writings with the role it plays
in Heidegger’s thought. Martin brings out the notion of truth as a
unique presupposition for logic: ‘logic presupposes and cannot expli-
cate a pre-logical understanding of truth’ (Martin 2006, p. 100). This
Heideggerian thesis Martin also finds in Frege’s writings: ‘Frege in-
sists … that the most basic logical notion is neither concept nor judg-
ment but truth … Here, Frege effectively approaches the central claim
of Heidegger’s mature philosophical logic’ (idem, p. 102). It is true
that in early and later writings Frege claimed that the aim of logic is to
know the laws of truth (Frege 1918, p. 58); the logical laws are a de-
velopment of the content of the word ‘true’ (Frege 1879-1891, p. 3).
However, judgement seems to play an equally important role, as Frege
characterizes the laws of logic both as the laws of truth and as the laws
of judgement. The point of logic is to give the laws of correct inference

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 235

(idem, p. 3), no less than to give the laws of judgement (Frege 1897,
p. 157). Essential to logic is the truth claimed in the act of judgement,
truth as we use it in our practice of judgements and inferences. As
Frege explicitly claims in ‘My Basic Logical Insights [1915]’, the essence
of logic cannot be found in the word ‘true’, but lies in the assertive

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force (NS, p. 272; PW, p. 252). When Frege calls the logical laws laws of
truth, he is speaking about truth as it is claimed in the act of judge-
ment. It is for this reason that the logical laws can be understood both
as laws of truth and as laws of judgement.
A comparison between Frege and the earlier phenomenological
tradition seems to be more relevant, at least for the interpretation of
Frege proposed in the final section below, in which the first-person
perspective plays a central role. Like Frege, Franz Brentano under-
stands the act of judgement to be logically primitive: it cannot be ex-
plained as a special kind of presentation. Because Brentano’s account
of judgement is a non-propositional one, a meaningful comparison is
to be given on a more general level.9
According to Brentano, a conceptual understanding of judgement is
to be obtained by descriptive psychology, later to be called ‘phenom-
enology ’. Descriptive psychology is distinguished from genetic psych-
ology, which studies the causal relations between mental events.
Descriptive psychology gives us a priori truths; for example, every
judgement is dependent upon an act of presentation. The logician
needs to take into account these truths, and descriptive psychology,
or phenomenology, is in this sense foundational to logic.
Frege’s elucidations of primitive terms differ in an important way
from the a priori truths given in the phenomenological tradition.
Whereas for Brentano and Husserl descriptive psychology or phenom-
enology is a science that precedes logic, for Frege logic is the founda-
tional science. Primitive notions, such as judgement and truth, can
only be understood by relating them to each other in elucidations.
Frege’s claim that judging is acknowledging the truth of a Gedanke
is such an elucidation. What precedes logic is propaedeutic, consisting
of elucidations, sharply to be distinguished from a priori truths, and
9
A more extensive comparison between Frege and the phenomenological tradition has to
wait for another occasion. As an example, in 1884, one of Brentano’s students, Anton Marty,
gives an evaluation of the first sections of Frege’s Begriffsschrift, and criticises the idea that
every judgement presupposes a connection of presentations (Vorstellungsverbindung).
According to Marty, the ‘is’ and ‘is not’ (‘+’ and ‘-’) signs of Brentano’s logic are on a par
with Frege’s judgement stroke (cf. Marty 1918, p. 56 ff.), a point that is in need of further
investigation.

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236 Maria van der Schaar

from definitions as well, which do have a role within logic as science.

For Frege, the foundation of logic consists in axioms and definitions,
not in elucidations given in natural language. The aim of elucidations
is a practical one, and good will and some guess work are needed from
those who try to understand them (Frege 1906, p. 288, orig. p. 301;

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Frege 1914, NS, p. 224; cf. Weiner 2010, pp. 58-61). Elucidations are to
be taken with a pinch of salt.

3. Judgement as ideal notion

Tyler Burge claims that Frege’s use of reason (Vernunft) is not to be
understood in a transcendental way. On Burge’s interpretation an
ideally rational mind plays a central role in Frege’s account of object-
ivity. The task of logic and mathematics is an investigation of the
Mind, not of minds (‘die Erforschung des Geistes …, nicht der
Geister’, Frege 1918, p. 74; Frege 1997, p. 342). In the Grundlagen,
Frege makes a distinction between what is actual (‘wirklich’) and
what is objective (GLA, §26; cf. GG, II, §74). Whereas the earth is
actual, because it may stand in causal relations, the equator is object-
ive, but not actual.10 Frege explains the objectivity of what is not actual
as an objectivity that is independent of sensations and presentations,
but not independent of reason (Vernunft). A certain number (Anzahl)
is dependent on the (objective) concepts we use to carve the world,
but this makes, for example, the number of lime trees not less object-
ive. The number of lime trees is not created by an act of judgement; we
merely acknowledge the number that is already there. It is not created
in thought, but acknowledged by thought. Reason as it is used here by
Frege is not to be identified with the rationality of individual acts, for
the number of lime trees at a certain moment is not dependent upon
any individual judger, however rational he or she may be. The realm of
Thoughts belongs to the realm of reason, too, as Thoughts are object-
ive, but not actual. Thoughts are independent of individual minds, but
not independent of reason.
Can one extend this role of reason in Frege’s writings to his view on
judgements? According to Burge, Frege’s logic makes use of a notion of
judgement as an idealized abstraction, as not being acts of individuals:
10
‘The world of actuality is a world in which this acts (litt.: works) on that’ (‘Die Welt des
Wirklichen ist eine Welt, in der dieses auf jenes wirkt’, Frege 1918, p. 76; Frege 1997, p. 343).
Alternative interpretations of Frege’s concept of wirklich are discussed in Künne (2010, p. 374
ff., and pp. 536-41).

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 237

‘Individuals can instantiate these judgements through their acts of

judgement, but the abstract judgements themselves seem to be inde-
pendent of individual mental acts’ (Burge 2000, p. 357). Burge’s reading
of Frege is to be applauded insofar as he recognizes that a non-empirical
notion of judgement plays a role in Frege’s logic. However, on Burge’s

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reading, Frege seems to allow for a Platonic realm of judgements, be-
sides the realm of Thoughts he already acknowledges. What are these
judgements, on Burge’s reading? Are they abstract, possible acts of
judgement associated with ideal logical thinking (Burge 1998, p. 319,
n. 2)? Or are they nothing but true propositions? The latter interpret-
ation cannot be right, as Burge himself acknowledges, since we are in
need of a notion of non-judged truths to account, for example, for true
but non-judged antecedents in hypothetical judgements.11 And there is
no textual evidence for the idea that judgements in the ideography are
abstract, possible acts of judgements, as we will see below. The judge-
ments in the Begriffsschrift seem rather to be made by its author, as
Frege says: ‘With this judgement stroke I close a sentence … and the
content of the sentence thus closed I assert as being true by the same
sign’ (Frege 1896, p. 232, orig. p. 377; cf. Frege 1891, orig. p. 22). It is true
that in the Grundgesetze Frege formulates the point without mentioning
himself as asserter: ‘in “£ 22 ¼ 4” it is asserted that the square of 2 is 4’
(Frege 1893, §5; cf. Frege 1891, orig. p. 22, n. 7). But as will be discussed
in the next section, it is essential to Frege’s logic that the asserter is not
mentioned in the use of the sign for assertive force.
Burge takes Frege’s ‘judgements of pure thought’ (Urtheile des reinen
Denkens) in §13 of the Begriffsschrift to be idealized acts of judgement
(Burge 1998, p. 319, n. 2), but I can find no support for this reading.
When Frege speaks of ‘judgements of pure thought’, he has non-em-
pirical judgements in mind, judgments of logic and arithmetic; being
non-empirical relates to the content of these judgements. Therefore, the
fact that Frege speaks in this context of ‘judgements of pure thought’
does not give evidence for the thesis that Frege is speaking here of
idealized acts of judgement independent of any individual judger.
Burge claims that Frege was interested in judgement as norm-yield-
ing form, not in judgement as human activity (Burge 1992, p. 311).
Judgement itself is not norm-yielding, though; it is the truth aimed at
in judgement that yields the norm. It is true that Frege is not inter-
ested in judgement as a mental process, but this does not imply that he
is speaking of an altogether different kind of judgement, of
11
Burge (2000, p. 357). Cf. Russell’s point in footnote 6.

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238 Maria van der Schaar

judgements made by an ideally rational mind. What is unique is the

perspective from which these judgements are studied: they are studied
from a logical point of view. There are not two kinds of judgements, as
Burge assumes: human judgements that happen at a certain time and
place, and abstract idealized judgements outside space and time. There

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is only one kind of judgement, namely, the human, fallible judgement,
but it may be looked at from two different perspectives: as a phenom-
enon in the empirical world, to be studied by psychology, and as a
logical phenomenon, standing under objective logical norms consti-
tuted by the norm of truth and the laws of truth. Apart from the final
judgement that awaits us all on Judgement Day, judgement is a fallible
affair. The judgement stroke in Frege’s ideography is a sign of judge-
mental force, and, as stated in §2 above, there is no judgemental force
without a judging agent. By using the judgement stroke in front of the
logical axioms and theorems in his ideography Frege claims that they
are true, and known by him. As soon as Frege acknowledged that there
are doubts about Basic Law (V), the truth claim had to be withdrawn,
as we can see from the presentation of the law in the afterword of the
Grundgesetze from October 1902: the ‘law’ is no longer preceded by a
judgement stroke. What is left is nothing but the empirical fact that
Frege once judged the content to be true. The judgement stroke may
still be present in front of the sentence expressing ‘Basic Law’ (V) in
one’s copy of the Grundgesetze, but it has lost its proper function.
Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus (4.442), that the judgement
stroke in Frege’s ideography only shows that Frege holds the relevant
proposition to be true, applies to the situation in which the judgement
stroke has lost its proper function. Only then do we take it as a sign of
an empirical fact: Frege once held the proposition to be true.

4. Judgement from a first-person point of view

In the previous sections, Frege’s notion of judgement has been ex-
plained along a via negativa: the logical judgement is not to be studied
from a third-person, external point of view, as an event in the world,
nor is it to be understood as an idealized abstraction. Furthermore,
doubts have been raised as to whether the logical judgement can be
understood in transcendental terms. In this section, I suggest that
Frege’s logical notion of judgement is best seen as a first-person
notion. The relation between the first-person point of view and asser-
tion can be explained by means of Moore’s paradox. This explanation
also shows that the first-person point of view is the point of view of

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 239

the first-person present. Although Moore’s sentence ‘It’s raining, but I

don’t believe that it is’ may be true, the assertion of the sentence
creates a paradox. Furthermore, the paradox does not arise if the
grammatical first-person present is not in place. No paradox arises
when one asserts ‘It’s raining, but John doesn’t believe it’, or ‘It was

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raining, but I didn’t believe it’. Even when I assert ‘It’s raining, but
Maria van der Schaar doesn’t believe it’, the paradox does not arise,
because I may not realize that I am the bearer of that name. The
paradox arises only when the asserter refers to himself or herself by
means of the first-person indexical, while using the present tense. An
interesting account of the paradox is given by Jonathan Adler and
Bradley Armour-Garb. In their argument they make use of what I
will call the AA-G principle: ‘For you fully to believe that p is for it
to be true that p (from your first-personal point of view)’ (Adler and
Armour-Garb 2007, pp. 153, 154). In a sincere assertion that p, they
claim, one expresses one’s belief that p. In one’s assertion of the
Moore sentence, one expresses: I believe [that it rains, and that I do
not believe that it rains]. From this it follows: I believe that it rains, and,
I believe that I do not believe that it rains. Because of the AA-G prin-
ciple, it follows from the latter that I do not believe that it rains, which
is in explicit contradiction with I believe that it rains (Adler and
Armour-Garb 2007, pp. 147-9). Without proposing an analysis of
Moore’s paradox here, the analysis given above is of interest to our
topic, for it makes use of the idea of a first-person point of view. It
uses the idea of a first person without bringing in the idea of first-
person access to one’s beliefs. In contrast to other explanations of
Moore’s paradox, the truth of the principle ‘If I believe that S, then
I believe that I believe that S’ is not presupposed. In general, the idea
of a first-person perspective is not to be identified with the idea of
(privileged) first-person access to one’s own thoughts and feelings.
The central point of the idea that Frege understands judgement not
only in a logical sense, but also from a first-person point of view, is
that the ideography is essentially a first-person engagement: each of us
can make use of the ideography as a calculus only if we have made the
axioms and inference rules evident to ourselves.12 In this sense, the
calculus is essentially embedded in the ideography as universal
12
One should make the mode(s) of inference evident to oneself by means of the explan-
ation given in Bs, §6 or GG, §14 ff., which is possible as soon as one has understood the basic
notions involved (Bs, §5). The act of inference in which the mode of inference is applied will
thereby be an epistemic act. The question how the idea of a first-person perspective may clarify
Frege’s notion of evidence and justification deserves another paper.

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240 Maria van der Schaar

language, as a science of logic. By putting the judgement stroke in

front of an axiom, the agent claims not only that the Thought is true,
but that anyone who understands the Thought thereby acknowledges
it as true, and is thus entitled to use it as an axiom. By putting the
judgement stroke in front of a theorem, the agent claims that anyone

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who knows the axioms and has made the relevant inference rules
evident to himself or herself is entitled to use the theorem as a logical
law. These judgements are thus made from a first-person perspective,
but they are non-personal at the same time.
This thesis can be extended to assertive force in general, and some
modifications of assertive force may count as first-person and non-
personal, too. When one says in a discussion ‘I doubt that what you
say is true’, one is generally not thereby expressing one’s subjective
feelings of doubt. Rather, one is claiming that there are reasons to
doubt that the content is true. Such a doubt is not personal, although
it is first-person insofar as the reasons for doubt are judgements made
from a first-person perspective. In general, though, the judgement
stroke differs in this respect from other signs of force. When one
uses a sign intimating a certain wish, one does not claim that
anyone who understands the content will have the same wish. In
contrast to judging, wishing is personal.
The distinction between a first-person and a third-person perspec-
tive, and, in general, the distinction between a logical and an empirical
notion of judgement, may help us to explain some tensions in Frege’s
writings. On the one hand, Frege claims in ‘Die Verneinung’ that a
judgement is an act of judging, as a jump is a deed of jumping, and
one cannot fully understand the act without knowing the agent:
If a judgement is an act, it happens at a certain time and thereafter belongs
to the past. With an act there also belongs an agent, and we do not know
the act completely if we do not know the agent. (Frege 1919, p. 151, note 4;
Frege 1997, p. 354)
On the other hand, in the draft letter to Jourdain, Frege writes:
If I assert something as true, I do not want to speak about myself, about a
process in my mind. And in order to understand it, one need not know
who asserted it. (WB, pp. 126, 127)
Frege says both that one cannot understand the judgemental act with-
out knowing who the agent is, and that one can understand an asser-
tion without knowing who made the assertion. Equipped with the
distinction between a logical and an empirical notion of judgement,

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 241

we may say that when judgement is compared to jumping, happening

at a certain time, and then belonging to the past, Frege thinks of
judgement as an empirical phenomenon, to be represented by the
predicate Jxy, in which case we have to add a name for the judging
agent in order to fully understand this particular event of judging. In

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contrast, in the passage in the draft letter, Frege speaks of judgement
from a logical point of view, to be represented by the judgement
stroke. In order to understand the assertion, we do not need to
know who made it, although the agent is relevant insofar as he or
she is responsible for the assertion made. The sign of judgemental
force is not to be accompanied by the name of the judging agent.
When the descriptive part of the assertion contains the first-person
indexical, the agent knowingly speaks about himself or herself; only in
such special cases do we have to know who made the assertion to
understand it fully.
Another tension in Frege’s writings is created by the fact that Frege
speaks of the Thought sometimes as the object of judgement, some-
times as the content of judgement. As in Russell’s analysis of propos-
itional attitudes, in the second half of Frege’s ‘Über Sinn und
Bedeutung’, thinking and believing are understood as relations be-
tween a subject and a Thought.13 In the sentence ‘Copernicus believed
that the movements of the planets are circles’, the that-clause refers to
the Thought that the movements of the planets are circles, and the
relation of believing is to be expressed by a two-place predicate.
Thoughts may thus be understood as objects. Belief, opinion, being
convinced, judging, and understanding are treated here as having a
Thought as their object, because these propositional attitudes are
understood from a third-person point of view.
In Frege’s elucidations of the logical notion of judgement, the
Thought is understood to be the content of the judgement, not some-
thing to which the judgement is directed, but what directs the judge-
ment to the truth-value of the Thought. The judgement made
manifest by the assertion ‘John is a football player’ is not about the
Thought that John is a football player; it is about John and the concept
of being a football player precisely insofar as they contribute to the

13
Frege differs from Russell in his analysis of orders and wishes. For Frege, in 1892, the
that-clause in the sentence ‘Napoleon ordered that the troops should retreat’ does not refer to
a Thought, but to an order, which differs from a Thought in not being a bearer of truth and
falsity. The imperative sentence itself, uttered by Napoleon, ‘Retreat the troops!’, has as its Sinn
the order to retreat the troops, while not having a Bedeutung (SB, pp. 38, 39).

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242 Maria van der Schaar

truth-value of that Thought. From a first-person perspective, the

Thought is the content of one’s judgement.
The distinction between the logical judgement and the empirical
judgement can also be used to clarify the question whether the act of
judging is, for Frege, an act of knowing, resulting in a piece of know-

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ledge. On the one hand, Wolfgang Künne and Michael Kremer rightly
claim that Frege allows for the fact that someone may judge a false-
hood to be true: ‘What is true, is true independent of our acknow-
ledgement. We can make mistakes’ (Frege 1879-1891, p. 2). The
translation of ‘anerkennen’ as ‘recognizing’ has perhaps played a mis-
leading role, because ‘recognizing’ has a clear epistemic meaning,
whereas ‘anerkennen’ is probably not to be understood in an epistemic
sense (Künne 2010, p. 430). On the other hand, Mark Textor,
Wolfgang Carl, and Tom Ricketts have claimed that Frege uses in
his logic a strict notion of judgement: we cannot judge a falsehood.
Ricketts does not attribute to Frege the view that we are infallible in
our judgements. The point is rather that Frege would not use the term
‘judgement’ in cases where the content is false (Ricketts 1996, p. 131).
One of Ricketts’ arguments is that Frege uses ‘judgement’ (Urteil) in
contexts where the Thought is true, while using ‘holding true’
(Fürwahrhalten) in other contexts.
Ricketts is right to hold that there is some system in Frege’s ter-
minology. In the first place, although this is not explicitly noted by
Frege or Ricketts, judging (Urteilen) is an act, while holding true
(believing, Fürwahrhalten) is a state or disposition. Early Frege ex-
plains inference as an act of judgement justified by judgements already
made. Inference is rightly explained as a special case of the act of
judgement, and is not understood in terms of belief as a mental
state. Secondly, Frege distinguishes in the ‘Logik’ (1897, NS, p. 157;
PW, p. 145) laws of judgement from laws of holding true or believing.
The normative laws of judgement are the laws of truth, the logical
laws. The laws of holding true are empirical laws about how people
think. There is no logic of belief on Frege’s account, because he under-
stands the laws of belief to be empirical laws about how people think.
In the preface to the Grundgesetze, and in ‘Der Gedanke’, Frege no
longer uses the term ‘laws of judgement’ when he speaks of the logical
laws, afraid that this might lead to confusion. He still uses, though, the
term ‘laws of holding true’ for the empirical laws, in contrast to the
logical laws of truth: ‘I understand by logical laws not psychological
laws of holding true, but laws of truth’ (GG, p. xvi). Although Frege’s
terminology is not fixed, in most of the important passages the term

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 243

‘judgement’ is used by Frege for the logical notion, whereas he uses the
dispositional term ‘holding true’ in a psychological, empirical sense.
We thus see that the terminological distinction between ‘judging’ and
‘holding true’ reflects a distinction between the logical and the em-
pirical point of view.

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The thesis that we cannot judge a falsehood is supported by those
passages in Frege’s writings in which no conceptual distinction be-
tween judgement and knowledge is acknowledged where this would
be relevant. In ‘Über Sinn und Bedeutung’, Frege writes that we obtain
a piece of knowledge only when the Thought is combined with its
truth-value: judging is an advancing from the Thought to its truth-
value (SB, p. 35). And at the end of his life, he writes: ‘A piece of
knowledge (Eine Erkenntnis) arises, because a Thought is acknowl-
edged as being true’ (NS, p. 286). Furthermore, within Frege’s logic,
each judgement should be known. The judgement sign is a sign that
the content is acknowledged to be true. At the same time, within the
ideography, one is entitled to make the judgement only if one knows
that the content is true. For the asserted content is either an axiom,
which is known as soon as one understands the content, or a theorem,
which is known because one has justified it by means of known prem-
ises in an epistemic act of inference.
The distinction between first- and third-person perspective may be
used to clarify the lack of conceptual distinction in these places be-
tween judgement and knowledge. When we look at judgement from a
third-person point of view, there is a conceptual difference between,
on the one hand, judgement or belief, and, on the other hand, know-
ledge, but from a first-person point of view one takes one’s judgement
to be true and justified, that is, to be knowledge.14 The central role of
the first-person perspective in the notion of judgement in Frege’s
ideography may explain why in crucial passages no conceptual space
between judgement and knowledge is acknowledged. It is only from a
third-person perspective that Frege can say: once I judged the fifth
basic law to be true, but I now understand that the act cannot have
resulted in a piece of knowledge. There is no reason to think that Frege
would deny that he had made a judgement. From a third-person
perspective, he does allow for a conceptual distinction between judge-
ment and knowledge.

14
Markus Stepanians has already noted that a judgement represents itself phenomenologic-
ally as a knowing from the point of view of the first-person present (Stepanians 1998, p. 105).

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244 Maria van der Schaar

The distinction between the first- and the third-person perspective

may also help to elucidate two passages in Ricketts’ paper that may
puzzle the reader when put together. On the one hand, Ricketts claims
that Frege does not endorse Moore’s and Russell’s theory of judge-
ment, in which judgement is understood as a binary relation between

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minds and propositions (Ricketts 1996, p. 130). On the other hand, he
says: ‘Construing the clauses of indirect discourse to be proper names,
he [Frege] takes judging to be a relation that holds between cognizers
and thoughts’ (idem, p. 139). Whereas in the first passage Ricketts
speaks of Frege’s logical notion of judgement, the context of the
latter claim makes it clear that the judgement as a propositional atti-
tude is at stake, that is, judgement from a third-person, external point
of view. Frege endorses the thesis that, understood as an event in the
world, judgment is a dual relation, to be represented by a predicate,
but he does not do so if judgement is understood in a logical sense.
Finally, the distinction between a first- and a third-person perspec-
tive may be used to clarify a difficult passage in the draft letter to
Jourdain mentioned earlier:
Whoever understands a sentence uttered with assertoric force adds to it his
acknowledgement of the truth. If a sentence uttered with assertoric force
expresses a false Thought, then it is logically useless and strictly speaking,
incomprehensible. (WB, p. 127)15
Frege is not denying that we can understand a sentence S, which is
uttered with assertive force by someone and which expresses a false
Thought. Viewing judgement from a third-person point of view, we
may say ‘He judges that S’, and this makes sense when the Thought
expressed by S is false. What Frege is denying is that we can under-
stand the assertion from a first-person perspective. From a first-person
perspective, that is, from a logical point of view, understanding a
declarative sentence uttered with assertive force is grasping the
Thought expressed by the sentence, and acknowledging it to be true.
Both the wider context of the passage and the phrase ‘logically useless’
show that assertion is to be understood in a logical sense.
Understanding assertion in this sense means that one is able to
make use of it for oneself as a premise: ‘Only after a Thought has
been acknowledged by me as true, can it be a premise for me’ (WB, p.
118, remarks for Jourdain, probably from 1910). If logic is essentially
done from a first-person perspective, one can also understand why
Frege repeatedly says that one’s premises have to be true. Applying to
15
I owe this reference to Michael Kremer.

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 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 245

judgement the AA-G principle mentioned at the beginning of this

section, one gets: for one to judge that S is for it to be true that S
(from one’s first-person point of view).16
Michael Kremer has asked what precisely is taken to be incompre-
hensible in the passage quoted above. Is it ‘(a) the sentence p, which

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happens to express a false Thought, and to be uttered by speaker S
with assertive force’, or is it ‘(b) the sentence-p-uttered-with-assertive-
force-by-S’? (Kremer 2000, pp. 567-8). He rightly answers that it is (b):
understanding (b) requires ‘a sharing not only in thoughts grasped,
but also in judgements’ (idem, p. 568). I subscribe to Kremer’s inter-
pretation so far. In order to explain that, on Frege’s account, p needs
to be true, Kremer makes use of the idea that the purpose of assertion
is, for Frege, ‘to give the hearer H a new starting point for inferences,
which H can use to acquire further knowledge’ (idem). And this pur-
pose can only be fulfilled if the Thought expressed is true. Kremer
concludes that assertion ‘is [for Frege] an act that has its place in the
joint venture of science, of adding to and building up a structure of
knowledge’ (idem). However, I do not think that this conclusion is
supported by the passage, or by Frege’s writings in general. As I read
Frege, his notion of knowledge and science is primarily first-person.
For Frege, an assertion is primarily the manifestation of an act of
judgement. A mathematician can never use a conclusion proven by
someone else without having himself acknowledged each of the prem-
ises and each mode of inference used in the process of demonstration.
The social aspect of science is grounded rather in the fact that judge-
ments made by different people may have the same Thought as con-
tent. A Thought may be the common property of many (SB, p. 29),
but it can only become common property by being actualised in par-
ticular acts of thinking, questioning, and judging. Our aim in science
is the truth or falsity of the Thought, not the Thought as such (idem,
pp. 33, 35). Judgements thus play a crucial role in science. Frege’s point
in the passage is that I cannot use a Thought as a premise for making
further inferences unless I myself have acknowledged it as true; ‘The
acknowledgement of the truth of the premises is necessary ’ (Letter to
Dingler, 31.1.1917, WB, p. 30). As I understand him, Frege is claiming in
the passage above that if one sees that others are drawing conclusions
from judgements containing false Thoughts, one cannot logically
make sense of this. As soon as one understands that a mistake has
16
This leaves untouched the criticism, mentioned in the Introduction, that Frege’s view of
logic does not allow for drawing inferences from assumptions.

Mind, Vol. 127 . 505 . January 2018 ß van der Schaar 2017
246 Maria van der Schaar

been made, the judgement no longer has any logical role to play.
Whereas Kremer takes Frege’s project of logic as science to be a
‘joint venture’, I take a first-person notion of understanding to be
central to Frege’s idea of logic as science.
In what sense would it be possible to understand Frege’s logic as a

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joint pursuit? In a dialogical context, the judgement stroke is under-
stood as a sign of assertive force. The fact that, for Frege, judgement
and assertion are counterpart notions makes it possible to introduce
ideas from speech act theory to elucidate his notion of judgement. In a
dialogical context, the judging agent is held responsible for the asser-
tion made. We have seen that the judgement stroke does not describe
a situation in the world. It is a sign of judgemental or assertive force: a
pragmatic rather than semantic sign. Frege’s theory of judgement is
thus naturally embedded in a pragmatic account of assertion and in-
ference, but his logic is primarily first-person nonetheless. Whereas we
would now explain the inner notion of judgement in terms of the
outer notion of assertion, this order of explanation is not endorsed
by Frege. Notions from speech act theory for Frege are secondary in
the order of explanation. The task of the logician is to find the laws of
logic, the basic laws of truth, and to present the logical truths that can
be derived from them in the right order, so that one can understand
why they are true. The creative work of the logician consists in finding
and elucidating new concepts, through which a new axiom may be
acknowledged, and new inferences become possible. Here the logician
can only give some elucidations in the hope that others will grasp the
primitive concepts for themselves, and thus be able to understand why
the relevant Thought is a basic law and can therefore be used as an
axiom. In this way Frege hoped to show that all truths of arithmetic
can be demonstrated by logical means alone.
We have seen that the presence of the judgement stroke does not
make Frege’s logic psychologistic, since the logical notion of judge-
ment is to be distinguished from the empirical notion. But now we are
confronted with a related problem because of the introduction of the
idea of a first-person perspective: doesn’t the idea that Frege’s logical
notion of judgement is to be understood from a first-person perspec-
tive imply a form of relativism? If there is no distinction between being
judged to be true and being true, from a first-person point of view,
there is indeed a threat of relativism. However, Frege says in the
Grundgesetze that being true is not the same as being held to be
true (Fürwahrgehaltenwerden) and that it is not to be reduced to the

Mind, Vol. 127 . 505 . January 2018 ß van der Schaar 2017
 Frege on Judgement and the Judging Agent 247

latter (GG, p. xv). Given the fact that error is possible, one cannot but
acknowledge that our holding something to be true is not the same as
its being true. Even from a first-person perspective, one may acknow-
ledge the general fact that error is possible. The fact, though, that we
have actually made a mistake can only be determined by invoking a

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third-person perspective. The fact that Frege uses the term ‘being held
to be true’ shows that he is speaking here of judgement from a third-
person point of view. Presented with a conflict between our actual
judgement, which is made from a first-person perspective, and our
former judgement, which is considered from a third-person perspec-
tive, we may conclude that our former judgement is based on a mis-
take. In the presentation of his ideography as a science, there is, for
Frege, no conceptual distinction between a Thought’s being acknowl-
edged as true and the Thought’s being known. However, after having
read Russell’s letter, Frege understands that a contradiction is implied
by Basic Law (V). Now, he considers the ideography as presented in
the Grundgesetze from a third-person point of view, and decides that
he can no longer use the judgement sign in front of ‘Basic Law’ (V).
We are now able to answer the question put forward in §2. How can
we understand the judging agent in Frege’s ideography as a transcen-
dental ego, if these judgements are fallible, that is, if mistakes are pos-
sible? From a first-person perspective, the judging agent may indeed be
understood as a transcendental ego. From this perspective, being
acknowledged as true conceptually involves being true; the question
of fallibility does not arise. However, Frege does not define truth in
terms of judgement; he is a realist with respect to truth. When we look
at our past judgements, that is, when we see them from a third-person
point of view, we understand that error is possible; being held to be true
does not involve being true. It is thus that we acknowledge the fallibility
of our judgements, and of the ideography as presented. In §2, I pointed
out that in the preface to the Grundgesetze Frege does not give a tran-
scendental argument for the logical laws. As we have seen, Frege did not
deny that there may be others rejecting the logical laws we have
acknowledged. But he did deny, in sentence (5) in the quotation
given there, the possibility that one can acknowledge and doubt the
same logical law at once, that is, from a first-person perspective.17
17
I thank Michael Kremer, Per Martin-Löf, Jan van Ophuijsen, Göran Sundholm, Mark
Textor, and the anonymous referees for helpful criticism on former versions of the paper. I
would also like to thank the audience and organisers of the 2015 meeting of the Society for the
Study of the History of Analytical Philosophy at Trinity College, Dublin, where I presented a
version of the paper.

Mind, Vol. 127 . 505 . January 2018 ß van der Schaar 2017
248 Maria van der Schaar

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