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THE CONCEPT HORSE IS A CONCEPT

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2017

ANSTEN KLEV
ANSTEN KLEV*
Affiliation:
Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences
*
*INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY CZECH ACADEMY OF SCIENCES JILSKÁ 1 110 00 PRAGUE 1 CZECH REPUBLIC E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

I offer an analysis of the sentence ‘the concept horse is a concept’. It will be argued that the grammatical subject of this sentence, ‘the concept horse’, indeed refers to a concept, and not to an object, as Frege once held. The argument is based on a criterion of proper-namehood according to which an expression is a proper name if it is so rendered in Frege’s ideography. The predicate ‘is a concept’, on the other hand, should not be thought of as referring to a function. It will be argued that the analysis of sentences of the form ‘C is a concept’ requires the introduction of a new form of statement. Such statements are not to be thought of as having function–argument form, but rather the structure subject–copula–predicate.

Keywords

03A0503B15Gottlob Fregetype theorypredication
Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Symbolic Logic , Volume 11 , Issue 3 , September 2018 , pp. 547 - 572
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Symbolic Logic 2017 

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References

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