The contemporary significance of Frege's pragmatics

• Applicant: Privatdozent Dr. Thorsten Sander
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: since 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 439302327

With the exception of his theory of indexicals and of assertions, Frege’s pragmatics has received strikingly little attention, and scholars who do discuss his ideas frequently take them to be incoherent or outdated. The main goal of the project is to show that Frege’s "rich palette of semantic relations" (Karttunen 2016) deserves much more attention as a competitor to contemporary approaches. The project consists of two main parts. The first part is primarily expository and aims at devising a map of the whole of Frege’s pragmatics, covering Frege’s views on illocutionary force, context-dependence, colourings, side-thoughts, multi-propositional sentences and presuppositions. The second part will be concerned with how some key problems of pragmatics might be dealt with from a fregean point of view.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants