ABSTRACT
Gottlob Frege sought to eliminate the ambiguities and confusions that arise as a result of the multiple uses of the subject-predicate structure in natural language. In his comparison of the concept-script to a microscope, Frege emphasizes the qualitative enhancement, since he speaks of “sharpness of discrimination”. This chapter shows how Frege completed the generalization of the function-argument structure, and how deliberately he imported the mereological pattern into the wider context of ordinary language, thereby making explicit its linguistic character, and explains Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet’s emancipated function. The conception of the relation between object and concept is fundamental to the semantics and to the account of general or quantified sentences that Frege discovered. Just as the hyper-mesocosmic and therewith counterintuitive orientation of modern inquiry gave rise to a world of mere appearances, so too Frege’s ideography elicits a rift between reality and appearance within the province of natural language.
