ABSTRACT
This chapter applies the contemporary idea of the constitutive features of assertions to the texts of Gottlob Frege, Rudolf Carnap, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. The focus is in Frege and Carnap, but a connection to Wittgenstein’s remarks on philosophy is indicated at the end of the paper. I intend to study and compare the three philosophers’ views on philosophical asserting and philosophical assertions. The question about the limits of language is thus posed in pragmatic terms, because it is formulated as a question about the limits set to linguistic acts labelled as assertings. I focus on Frege’s Begriffschrift (1879) and his Grundlagen der Arithmetik (1884), and on Carnap’s article titled “Empiricism, Semantics, and Ontology” (1950/1956); I then make a few remarks on Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations and On Certainty. I argue that there are important connections between Frege’s and Carnap’s views on the limits of asserting. Their otherwise diverging positions are connected in that, as they show, it is not easy for philosophers themselves to comply with the norms they give for judging and asserting. I argue that while Frege does not make his attitude towards philosophical assertions explicit, the common core in Carnap’s and Wittgenstein’s texts is that the epistemic norms they give to assertions lead both to deny the possibility of philosophical assertions.
