Frege on Concepts by Haig KhatchadourianReview by: Michael D. ResnikThe Journal of Symbolic Logic, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Mar., 1970), p. 132Published by: Association for Symbolic LogicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2271171 .

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132 REVIEWS

every turn definitions are lacking, terms are ambiguous, a definition occurs within a theorem or a theorem within a definition, discussions interrupt one another. Some pages are full of blunders of spelling and grammar.

But this is no definitive judgment on the treatise. It evidently suffers from lack of organization and failure to give any clear expression to the underlying thoughts. On the other hand it is quite probable that there are thoughts. I think an attempt to interpret and rewrite the text in a con- sistent way might well be very fruitful.

The first volume is the author's Ph.D. thesis at Amsterdam. HANS FREUDENTHAL

HAIG KHATCHADOURIAN. Frege on concepts. Theoria (Lund), vol. 22 (1956), pp. 85-100. This paper is devoted to an analysis of Frege's thesis that concepts are incomplete. The author

states that Frege held that concepts are incomplete truth-values. However, the author finds it difficult to give a literal interpretation to this claim as no concept can exist apart from a truth- value. Claiming that concepts are attributes, he suggests that the concept-object distinction can be drawn via the universal-particular one. However, particulars cannot exist apart from attributes, and so the incompleteness of the latter still remains unexplained. To resolve this the author says that concepts and objects must be considered as particulars, and incompleteness interpreted in physical or mental terms. The author realizes that this is very un-Fregean, but believes that we are forced to this, anyway.

Comments. (1) Concepts are not incomplete truth-values (or anything else) if the claim that they are implies that they can be completed and still remain concepts. (2) It is misleading to call Fregean concepts attributes, as the former are extensional (see e.g. Frege's review of Husserl XVIII 92(7), page 80 of the translation, or page 320 of the German original). (3) It is also mis- leading to call Fregean objects particulars, since truth-values, Wertverldufe, and other abstract entities are Fregean objects. MICHAEL D. RESNIK

RICHARD M. MARTIN. On acting on a belief. Studies in the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, Second series, edited by Edward C. Moore and Richard S. Robin, The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst 1964, pp. 212-225.

The author proposes to discuss some of the issues involved in the analysis of the notion of acting on a belief, rather than to offer an actual analysis of the notion. He suggests first of all that an adequate analysis must make use of general semiotic, including syntactics, semantics, and pragmatics as well as logic. There is a brief excursion into the philosophy of logic, with the author objecting to the notion of "proposition" as "meaning of a statement." He concludes, however, that this particular quibble is not germane to the main thrust of his article.

There seems to be a hint in one or two places in the article that the general semiotic to be employed in analyses, such as that of acting on a belief, ought to be considered an "applied logic"-a logic with special predicates, variables, etc., appropriate to the business of semiotic.

Aside from the matters mentioned here, the article is outside the purview of this JOURNAL.

J. JAY ZEMAN

J. F. STAAL. Some semantic relations between sentoids. Foundations of language, vol. 3 (1967), pp. 66-88.

Part I proposes that lexical entries for predicates in a transformational grammar should con- tain "indicatory symbols." These represent meaning postulates of the form P(xl, * * *, xn) ?-+

Q(yO, * * *, y,), where P is the predicate in question, Q is a predicate, and the y's are some permutation of the x's. The author claims that his proposal would give the transformational grammarian a way to represent meaning equivalences such as that between John sells books to Peter and Peter buys books from John. He also claims, without real argument, and implausibly, that there is no way to represent such meaning equivalences within the semantic theory of Katz, Fodor, and Postal.

Part II considers how one might distinguish the "topic" of a sentence from its "comment." These are relative notions. Consider the sentence Glass is elastic. If seen as an answer to What is glass?, its topic is glass and its comment is elastic. If seen as an answer to What is elastic ? topic and comment are reversed. The comment, in this sense, must be given extra stress when the sentence is pronounced. The author defines comment as that constituent which is questioned

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