ABSTRACT
Any historically based assessment of Frege’s contributions to contemporary thought begins, and ultimately ends, with Frege’s logicist program: the project of reducing arithmetic to logic. As conceived by Frege, to carry through this project, it was necessary to demonstrate that the truths of arithmetic could be faithfully rendered by true logical propositions; that is, by propositions expressed in purely logical terms, using no terms with any residual mathematical content. On Frege’s perspective, scientific discourse can successfully express truths about the external world precisely because scientific languages are referential : because the expressions of the language refer to entities that exist independently of the language, the language can be used to assert propositions about those entities. At the core of Frege’s logicism is the view that logic is a science, in the sense that it is an axiomatic system, whose axioms—the Basic Laws of logic—express fundamental conceptual truths.
