Anton Alexandrov: Frege's Explication of Function and its Relevance for Logicism

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Anton Alexandrov (Universitat de Barcelona):
Frege's Explication of Function and its Relevance for Logicism

Frege‘s definitions of arithmetical notions in terms of extensions (or value ranges) of certain kinds of concepts (or functions) received two major interpretations. While the first school claims that he was attempting to give a conceptual analysis of these notions, the second school claims that he was really attempting to explicate them, i.e. to replace the pre-theoretic notions by more fruitful ones. In this talk, I argue for an in between position. My central claim is that Frege explicates the notion of function (in Function and Concept from 1891) in order to provide a conceptual analysis of some sort of the ordinary arithmetical notions.