Frege och idén om det givna : En undersökning av logisk form och idén om ett begreppsligt givet innehåll i språket

Sammanfattning: This study is an investigation of some main problems of the philosophy of language initiated by Gottlob Frege. Frege wanted to show that there is a conceptual content in expressions that is not the same as the psychological associations given in intuitions. He also wanted to show that such a content is objective and independent of thesubject. Moreover, the conceptual content in expressions gives a presentation of the world and functions as a link that mediates between the subject and the world.The method Frege developed in investigating the content of language is based on a clarification of a priori conditions for language. These conditions function as a frame for language and they also establish the ground for justifying sentences in being true or false. Frege's theories then do not answer the question of how we can communicate; his method is not based upon how language works in its daily use. Frege invented a way of formalising language that differentiates between the logical and the linguistical role of words. Since the linguistical forms sentences have in their colloquial use are not the same as their logical forms, Frege thus treated his formal language of the conceptual content as a language that is not used, but as a language that instead is a representation of the content. Consequently his investigation is not to be regarded as a formalisation of ordinary language but as a way to represent the descriptive content of language in a pure form.