- Gottlob Frege was a German logician, mathematician, and philosopher who played a crucial role in the emergence of modern logic and analytic philosophy. His work has influenced computer programming and mathematical set theory. He had some interesting things to say about language, and noticed some inconsistencies in way people thought about language and logic.
In Ueber Sinn Und Bedeututng Frege makes this assertion:
“Equality gives rise to challenging questions which are not altogether easy to answer.”
In order to understand what he means by this phrase we must flesh out two things. Firstly, we must understand what he means by “equality”, and secondly investigate the kinds of challenging questions which are not easy to answer.
When Frege uses the term “equality” the reader must understand that he is referring to certain ways people use language. Specifically, “equality” refers to the relationship that different words have in reference to the same object. For example, Frege brings up two different phrases which refer to the same object. He points out that the phrases “morning star” and “evening star” are two separate phrases that refer to the same object in the sky commonly called Venus. And in terms of equality they share a relationship since “morning star and “evening star” both equal the object Venus. It’s understandable how one can infer that “morning star and “evening star” share a relationship of equality since they both point to the same object. After all since they point to the same object, logically one would think that the phrases are identical (or to use Frege’s term equal). But Frege notices a complication in this reasoning.
Frege makes a keen observation in terms of people equating two separate phrases to one another. They aren’t necessarily saying that these phrases are actually the same. To use Frege’s Venus example, “the morning star” and “the evening star” do refer to the same object. But the phrases themselves are different when considering humanities relationship to the object and other contextual factors. In order to flesh this idea out further I will use an example of my own to convey the complication Frege is addressing.
Let’s say two people are looking at a person with a hat. One person is to the left and another person is on the right of the hat wearer. Now let’s say that this hat has two colors on it (red and blue ). The person on the left can only see the blue and the person on the right only sees the red. When these two people attempt to refer to the hat they could say something to the effect of “look at the “red” or “blue” hat”. If they were to go back to people who’d never seen the hat they’d use the colors they saw as ways to refer to the hat. So if one was given the description “blue” and they saw the red side of the hat they wouldn’t realize that the hat was the object being referred to. The only way the person would realize that is if they knew that the hat was BOTH red and blue. But the person is given a particular phrase to describe the object so we can’t fault them for not realizing that “blue hat” and “red hat” are equal in terms of referring to the hat. After all “blue hat” and “red hat” without the context of the duality of the hat wearer are to be understood differently. Complications like this are what Frege intends to point out.
Now the aforementioned example may seem highly unlikely. But you’d be surprised in the ways this complication pops up in the real world. Let’s take a case from the 21st century. On February 26th 2015 a picture began to circulate on the internet creating quite a stir on social media. The photo in question is known commonly as “the dress”, and it drew strong reactions. The reason being is that the object in question (the dress) appeared to convey two separate colors to observers. One set of individuals claimed it was “yellow” and another set said it was “blue”. But how could this be? To be
frank, there is no large consensus in terms of an explanation. But logically the object in question possess 2 color impressions at the same time. That would mean you could see both the blue and the yellow, but human cognition only allows for one. So logically it’s either yellow, blue, or neither. But despite the logical inconsistency people could talk and point to the dress while at the same time holding their own interpretation of “the dress”. So in this weird case “yellow dress” and “blue dress” mean the same thing when referring to “the dress”. But when they are alone and not referring to anything they absolutely can’t mean the same thing. Frege recognized this phenomena over a hundred years ago, and perhaps forces us to investigate human cognition itself when it comes to conundrums such as this.
Sermo Civilis 