Abstract
The present paper examines Frege’s notion of judgement, particularly the relation between judgement and truth and the possibility of false judgements. In the first section I will argue that the performance of a judgement consists neither in predicating truth nor in referring to the True; nor do we judge in thinking the Fregean sense of the word “true” in addition to a thought. The second section discusses two problems arising from Frege’s standard definition of judgement as acknowledging the truth of a thought. First, I shall argue that judgements do not imply truth; i.e. Frege’s use of “acknowledge” is not factive. Second, judgements are not comprised of an act of merely entertaining a thought and an act of acknowledging its truth; i.e. judgements are not cumulative. Rather, a judgement is one single act of acknowledging a thought as true or thinking truly. For this reason, the last section offers a new interpretation which takes Frege’s adverbial definition very serious. I will show that adverbialism with regards to judgements has no factive reading and allows for the normativity of truth. Hence, the adverbial theory of judgement fits logical inferences as well as spontaneous judgements.
Pfisterer, C C