ABSTRACT
There is a bitter controversy over the question how thoroughly linguistic – or how much of a turn – was indeed Frege’s linguistic turn. Was Frege’s conception of rule (of logic) Platonist? And how much so? Is there a representational conception lying at the basis of the Fregean and Tractarian phases? While there is a general interpretive agreement that there are traditional residues in Frege’s conception, their nature is debatable. Dummett’s principal criticism of Frege’s conception of language is twofold: he rejects what he takes to be Frege’s Platonism, or realism; and he mitigates Frege’s anti-psychologism, arguing that Frege’s barrier between the logical and the psychological was not only too rigid, but moreover, that it actually reflected its own deep-rooted psychologism. These two lines of criticism are, for Dummett, as they were for the later Wittgenstein, interconnected. Their upshot is that although Frege did intend to take language as primary in any philosophical inquiry, such traditional dogmas made him appeal to a ‘language’ that was not, exactly, language, and that as a result the right turn was taken in the wrong way.
