Frege on Syntax, Ontology, and Truth's Pride of Place

Abstract

Frege's strict alignment between his syntactic and ontological categories is not, as is commonly assumed, some kind of a philosophicalthesis. There is no thesis that proper names refer only to objects, say, or that what refers to an object is a proper name. Rather, the alignment of categories is internal to Frege's conception of what syntax and ontology are. To understand this, we need to recognise the pride of place Frege assigns within his theorising to the notion of truth. For both language and the world, the Fregean categories arelogicalcategories, categories, that is, oftruth. The elaboration of this point makes clear the incoherence of supposing that they might not align.