JOÃO LUCAS PIMENTA DA SILVA PINTO

I aim to investigate, within Frege's philosophy, what the meaningful use of language involves: what the essential factors are for a given utterance to count as something that was said and that can be understood. Despite the strong connection established by Frege between the dimensions of language and thought, any reading which takes this connection as a collapse of the distinction between these dimensions seems unwarranted: there are in Frege, I believe, conditions of possibility for an utterance to actually express the thought it seems to express. In particular, it seems to me the secondary literature has never recognized that there are different sources for the limits imposed on language in Frege's work: in addition to the purely logical source — responsible for the impossibility of adequately describing the meanings of logical primitives and for banning the construction of sentences that combine categorically incompatible expressions — there seems to exist at least one other source, of a cognitive nature — stemming from the fact that the sense of a term, taken as the "mode of presentation" of the object it purportedly denotes, may not be available to users of that term.