Dummett's Backward Road to Frege and to Intuitionism - Tripod

Quinean problems of inscrutability of reference and indeterminacy of translation implicitly abound in
Frege as early as 1884 in Grundlagen § 22, where one card pack is also many cards, and as late as the
permutation of red and green in “The Thought.” Dummett says, “In Grundgesetze, Volume I, §
10,...Frege uses a permutation argument to show that the Bedeutungen of value-range terms have not
yet been fixed. This appears to imply that he had ceased to believe that questions of reference are
internal to language” (1995: 13). Indeed, the card pack and duality of geometry permutation arguments
in Grundlagen appear to imply that Frege did not believe that questions of reference are internal to
language as early as 1884. 4 All this applies to purely logical names as well. Thus the sense and
reference of the identity name must assumed prior to any derivations of sense and reference for any
other subsentential names—purely logical or otherwise— in the object-language (Frege’s formal
notation) from the truth-conditions of statements in the object-language. Otherwise we beg the question
of the identity of identity. Similarly for all the other primitive logical names. I think Dummett knows
this. And I think that is why he is smuggling in our prior knowledge of the references and senses of all
eight of Frege’s primitive logical names under the guise of their belonging to the logical form of
statements. But their belonging to logical form scarcely hides their being subsentential names which
express senses and refer to references. Elsewhere, Dummett says that the context principle “must apply
to the logical constants as much as to other words” (2000: 252). Thus I think he must have option (2) in
mind after all. But their references are “derived” (proved) only when all references are mutually fixed
in Grundgesetze vol. 1, § 29, including identity! —Does § 29 contextually define all names, including
the undefined logical names?
The second problem is that of referential inscrutability of nonlogical terms. Even on option (2),
i.e., already fixing the senses and references of all eight primitive logical names in the object-language,
which eliminates the permutation problem for those eight names, and for all complex logical names
defined in terms of them, the permutation problem remains for all nonlogical names, such as names of
6