FREGE: Interview with Prof. Michael Potter (1/3)

Over three sessions I interview Michael Potter, Cambridge Professor and Frege expert, all about Frege. In this first session we cover a brief biography, some background on Frege's overall project, such as his anti-psychologism, and then go in-depth on his first published book, _Begriffsschrift_ (or Conceptual Notation), and some of the key ideas in that work, such as scope and quantification and the act-content distinction, and why they were so revolutionary.

The second session will be on Frege's second book, _Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik_ (The Foundation of Arithmetic), which is a deeply philosophical work that provided major insight for philosophy of mathematics.

The third session will discuss the Sense-Reference distinction, his third book, _Grundgesetz der Arithmetik_ (Basic Law of Arithmetic), Russell's paradox, and the lasting impact of Frege's work on philosophy.

Michael Potter's books are available here:

#Frege #Interview #MichaelPotter

---------- Video Contents ----------

00:00 - Introduction
03:10 - Frege's biography
10:36 - _Begriffsschrift_ of 1879
13:52 - Logic before 1879 (Stoic and Aristotelian logic)
16:27 - Quantifiers and scope.
19:38 - Does logic produce knowledge?
25:02 - How was Frege different?
31:23 - Frege's anti-psychologism and the act-content distinction.
38:07 - Anti-psychologism vs psychologism
44:18 - Logic's relation to arithmetic
49:13 - The revolutionary section 9 of _Begriffsschrift_
55:51 - How did Frege make this discovery?

_____Channel description_____

I am a graduate of Cambridge University with a PhD in Philosophy. My thesis was on the nature of truth, and I specialise in metaphysics, logic, and the history of analytic philosophy. I believe philosophy should be made accessible to the curious and philosophers have a duty to reenter the public debate on the questions of importance to our age. This channel is my attempt to do that!

On a personal level, I am a lucky husband, and proud father of two young boys that keep me very much grounded!

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[elwood]

Thanks for doing these interviews with Michael, I think they hit a terrific sweet spot between accessible/introductory and advanced/deep. You could (and many do) take upper level undergraduate or even graduate level courses in early analytic philosophy without gaining the depth or breadth of perspective on figures like Wittgenstein, Frege, and Ramsey that he has developed over his career. It's just great -- particularly in the long Wittgenstein video -- to be given access to this synoptic but incredibly expert view on these thinkers.

Please, at some point, try and get him to do something on Russell, especially the theory (theories) of judgment ... and maybe a 'gather them all together' video about the unity of the proposition. I can see that fitting in nicely with the themes of the videos so far (please!).

(It's also oddly gratifying to see Michael's face popping up on my YouTube feed alongside random celebrity videos the algorithms push. Thanks again!)

[artlessons]

Thank you, two brilliant minds discussing a brilliant theory. I see it as Frege's paragraph suits Wittgenstein's two philosophies; if one says John loves Mary, one pictures this and understands it. When one removes the names, it becomes a mathematical language game understood by the mathematical community, not the living world. It influenced Wittenstein's philosophies and Godels seeing something through the numbers in his incompleteness theory.

[skinnerddd]

These conversations are so clear and useful.
Thank you both.

[Simulera]

I found this discussion remarkably serious and useful, but still approachable by many different sorts of people and interests. But the video itself aside, the rest of your prepared production of the interview, the notation of segments -referencing of ideas and the times of their mention - and the occasional graphical support of a case in discussion, is really very good work. It makes it possible to hear it through and actually drill down in to specific things, go look up references even, in a genuinely scholarly even though informal way. I agree with and applaud your sense of mission to help people understand their environment better. Anyway, I subscribed and look forward to experiencing more of your work on the channel.

[aco]

Great video, thank you! (And thank you for the logic classes two years ago—and thank you Professor Potter for an interview as good as your lectures!)

[Achrononmaster]

@25:00 didn't Potter get the wrong end of the stick there? Introducing formal undecidability does not imply you can obtain non-trivial results "from your armchair". Rather, I think it means you really have to do some serious work, like go out on a limb and assume something, or measure something, to obtain non-trivial insights about the world from otherwise just pure thought. Apologies if I misunderstand his thought, but to me "from your armchair" is the "just mechanically" picture, but maybe that's just me. I agree with his sentiment of course.

[nightspore]

My philosophical training was here in America, and therefore heavily analytic. So what you are discussing isn’t new to me, but I have always had trouble with formal logic as a source of philosophically substantive conclusions. You can say merely that logic is a branch of philosophy rather than of mathematics and so produces substantive work in its own highly limited and technical sphere, but I have never read a philosophical work outside that sphere in which the main discussion was conducted in symbolic first order logic or any notable conclusion derived by means of purely abstract symbolic reasoning.

It seems that the richness of a sentence does not lie in being able to substitute variables for names or relations, but in knowing who those names belong to and what significance the relations have for them. Even more abstract discussions are not conducted, and for good reason, by means of symbolic logic. So why that particular rather desiccated paragraph should outshine Plato’s metaphor of the cave, Aristotle’s Third Man argument, Zeno’s Dichotomy and Stadium, Anselm’s ontological argument, Hume’s discussion of causality, Descartes’s Cogito, or dozens of other things, seems ludicrous to me.

I mean, “Debbie does Detroit” and “Sally does her homework” can both be symbolized r(a, b). The result is a stunningly pointless loss of distinction. Adding quantifiers really doesn’t help. It seems that some people in philosophy perennially want to be seen as hanging out with the cool kids doing math and science—I don’t mean reflecting on certain aspects of math and science, but really doing it, with their own gee-whiz symbolic calculus and everything. It has always struck me as kind of pathetic.

[aum]

Thanks, more satisfying than my 3 months undergraduate course in formal logic!

Please note that the mobile YouTube app I’m using does not show a button to start a membership (iPhone, feel free to ask more details).

BTW, Are those videos also available as podcasts?

[brunozarate]

I find similar the dichotomy between asserted and unasserted propositions in Frege's to Russell's distinction between propositions' primary and secondary occurrences. Are they equivalent or not? If not, are they complementary, rival or independent?

[denistremblay]

The reason why this most important paragragh idea of Frege was not discovered before is that the history of thought is the history of consciousness too. From Plato and Aristotle till Frege we go from spiritual level A to spiritual level B toward a more materialistic nominalist stance. the reason why are very deep but not at all arbitrary...It is related to the way the Logos idea of reason was treated and detotalized in an external relation instead of a participatory internal relation to consciousness. Ideas cannot manifest in the same way for any consciousness levels in history. human history is not a random set of events but is highly conditioned from many higher consciousness levels manifesting or not...

Nowadays philosophers dont study mathematics nor astrology nor mystical experiences... They even view language not as the pre-conscious organism it is but as a set of logical graphs and trees or as some sort of program. It is not. Language is an autonomous self conscious shell or body collective entity related to the ego. Not a logical machine but a perspective creating machine and non algorythmic at his roots. Language is a self TIMING set of engines.
Language speak trough us as much as we speak through it. Ask a poet. Language is so complex because it embodied consciousness at different levels. Then reducing language to logic is possible only when we ignore grammar of all languages huge complexities trading choices. Language is no more logical than mathematic at his roots is logical. They are musical. At level A language seems logically analysable; but at level B language is no more logically analysable as poetry and metaphorical thought and musical thought coupled together demonstrate.

My thanks to the host and to very clear explanations from M. Potter.

[darrellee]

No. The whole point is that reason would be exactly the same no matter what the human was like. Or rather that the human mind would have to conform to reason to be reasonable. Only one logos. 42:53