Frege and Analytical Philosophy

Letters

Vol. 2 No. 22 · 20 November 1980

From Peter Geach

SIR: In his review of the third edition of our Translations from the Philosophical Writings of Gottlob Frege (LRB, Vol. 2, No 18), Michael Dummett states: ‘The translation remains the same, save for the rendering of certain of Frege’s technical terms.’ Collation of the second and third editions would have shown very quickly that many small but significant changes were made, for the sake of clarity and accuracy, apart from the new renderings of Frege’s terminology.

A few years ago a committee sat in Oxford to consider the way of rendering Frege’s terminology and to draw up a glossary. We were glad to have Dummett on this committee, and its recommendations mainly had his personal approval: in particular, he approved rendering the verb bedeuten and its derivatives by the verb ‘to mean’ and its derivatives. These renderings of terms were used, as Dummett fails to mention, in the translation of Frege’s Nachlass by my Leeds colleagues White and Long; it was natural that Black and I should follow suit when the second edition of our volume was exhausted.

When Black and I originally chose our renderings for bedeuten and its derivatives, which are quite untechnical in their ordinary German uses, we aimed at giving correspondingly untechnical English renderings. We could not then foresee that during the next quarter-century ‘reference’ would become widely used in philosophy and linguistic theory as a key word in doctrines widely different from Frege’s. Since this did happen, we held that continued use of ‘reference’ to render Frege’s Bedeutung was inexcusably misleading, and fell into line with the White-Long translation. A misleading rendering should not be perpetuated because of current philosophical fashion.

Dummett suggests that when reconsidering which works of Frege ought to go in our selection, Max Black and I were moved by thoughts of whether, when a given work has been translated elsewhere, this was in a volume published by Blackwells or by some other publisher. This suggestion is of course quite unfounded.

Peter Geach
University of Leeds

From David Martin

SIR: Professor Dummett pointed out the need for a volume of English translations of Frege’s articles which ‘if not quite as comprehensive as Kleine Schriften, at least contains everything of major importance’. He and your readers may like to know that we have commissioned Brian McGuinness to edit a translation of Angellelli’s edition of Kleine Schriften which we will publish in 1982.

David Martin
Managing Director, Basil Blackwell, Oxford

Michael Dummett writes: In the prefatory note to the third edition of their translations from Frege, Professors Geach and Black say that, in addition to their new renderings of the quasi-technical terms, they have made ‘a few other changes’. In Professor Geach’s letter of complaint, these have now become ‘many small but significant changes’. I regret that, in reviewing the volume, I overlooked the remark in the note. I compared a few sample pages with the second edition, and found no changes other than those recorded in the glossary; since reading Professor Geach’s letter, I have compared another few sample pages, and have found just one stylistic change, small indeed, an improvement probably, but hardly very significant. Probably the estimate of their number in the prefatory note was more accurate. Possibly Professor Geach’s annoyance at my oversight might have been mitigated had he recalled that, for a review of the first edition, I checked the whole translation, sentence by sentence, against the German originals, a labour which resulted in many substantial improvements, there acknowledged, in the second edition. Professor Geach read my review carelessly if he took me as alluding to uses of the word ‘reference’ in non-Fregean senses. Rather, I remarked that as the result of Geach and Black’s adoption of it as their rendering of Frege’s term Bedeutung in the first edition of their volume, it has, for decades, been the standard equivalent of that term in English-language discussions of Frege. I personally regret the choice they made, and, in an encyclopedia article, used ‘meaning’ instead: but I won no converts to this emendation, and concluded that ‘reference’ could no longer be dislodged. As Professor Geach observes, I concurred in the use of ‘meaning’ for the translation of Frege’s posthumous papers, regarding it as the word that ought to have been used from the outset. That did not commit me to believing it right to make the same replacement in the celebrated Geach/Black volume, which, in present circumstances, represents a popular selection rather than a scholarly edition, and, in its original version, was the source of the now standard rendering ‘reference’. There is, in this third edition, no mention of this fact, only a disparaging comment on the use of ‘reference’ to translate Bedeutung. Students who know the translation only from the new edition may well be puzzled by the occurrence of the word ‘reference’ in the literature, and will certainly be unable to guess its origin. It is excellent news that Blackwell intends to issue a translation of the Kleine Schriften. I am sorry that Professor Geach takes offence at the suggestion that he was influenced by his publisher, but am at a loss to know what other relevant differences he saw between the Geach/Stoothoff volume, on the one hand, and those of Bynum and Furth, on the other.

Vol. 2 No. 23 · 4 December 1980

From Peter Geach

SIR: A very brief note will suffice on Professor Dummett’s further remarks on the Geach-Black volume of selections from Frege. It would be mere quibbling to dispute whether there are few or many changes of renderings in the new edition apart from those dictated by the new glossary. A quick look at ‘On Concept and Object’ would show that there are a dozen there, and the changes are significant: we have deliberately avoided ‘assert, assertion’ for aussagen, Aussage to avoid confusion with behaupten, Behauptung – it’s a pity Dummett failed to notice this; I do not see what his past services to the translation have to do with his present carelessness – they are in any case still acknowledged in this third edition.

My first letter explained why Black and I originally chose our renderings of bedeuten. Bedeutung and why we have now dropped these renderings. A selection’s being ‘popular’, as I hope ours may continue to be, is no reason why it should perpetuate renderings that have by now acquired misleading suggestions. The renderings we now adopt have of course been familiar to generations of young students from John Austin’s use of them in his translation of the Grundlagen, and they will now no longer be puzzled unnecessarily by a switch to other renderings in our selection.

Peter Geach
University of Leeds

Vol. 2 No. 24 · 18 December 1980

From Michael Dummett

SIR: No doubt it was careless of me to rely on the result of a spot check to conclude that there were no changes in the translation other than those recorded in the glossary; it was certainly careless to have overlooked the Prefatory Note: but it ill-becomes Professor Geach (LRB, Vol. 2, No 23) to make abusive remarks about carelessness when the first edition contained frequent omissions of phrases and of whole sentences, which might have gone uncorrected for much longer but for the labour undertaken by me of checking every line, and which, in my original review, I recorded, but did not castigate.

Professor Geach knows perfectly well that, in the Grundlagen, Frege was not yet using the word Bedeutung in the quasi-technical sense which prompted the original rendering of it as ‘reference’ in the Geach/Black volume: his mention of Austin’s translation is therefore quite irrelevant. I do not believe that the word ‘reference’ has been used in such divergent senses as to make it more misleading now as a rendering of Frege’s term than it was when the translation was first published: rather, it is now much less misleading, having become standard in discussions of Frege in English. I happen to think both that it would have been better to use ‘meaning’ in the first place, as I said in my review, and that it is now better to go on using ‘reference’. These are matters of opinion: what is hardly a matter of opinion is that it was unfair to leave readers in ignorance that previous editions used the rendering ‘reference’, so giving it general currency.

Michael Dummett
New College, Oxford

Vol. 3 No. 3 · 19 February 1981

From Peter Geach

SIR: Professor Dummett (LRB, Vol. 2, No 24) is not of opinion that uses of the term ‘reference’ divergent from Frege’s use of Bedeutung have by now made continued use of that rendering misleading. It is well-known that such uses of ‘referrence’ are widely prevalent in contemporary philosophy of language. Many contemporary writers practise the dubious art of puzzling out the way a sentence works as follows: pick out what your intuition tells you are referring expressions, and then say what they refer to or whether there is ‘referential failure’. Members of Dummett’s own Philosophy Sub-Faculty have been prominent in spreading abroad this sort of view, ever since Strawson published the article ‘On Referring’ in 1950; logic for PPE Prelims at Oxford is currently taught from a textbook (Wilfrid Hodges, Logic) that continually talks of ‘referring expressions’ and ‘referential failure’. One aim of the new translations of Frege is to dissociate Frege, in the minds of young students, from this kind of theorising, to which my own opposition has been a matter of public record for two decades. A change of rendering was of course projected at the committee meeting on Frege translation policy of years ago, on which Dummett and I both sat; the intention could not be carried out till the second edition of the Geach-Black book was exhausted.

Peter Geach
Department of Philosophy, University of Leeeds