Frege on Referentiality and Julius Caesar in Grundgesetze Section 10

Abstract

This paper aims to answer the question of whether or not Frege’s solution limited to value-ranges and truth-values proposed to resolve the “problem of indeterminacy of reference” in Section 10 of Grundgesetze is a violation of his principle of complete determination, which states that a predicate must be defined to apply for all objects in general. Closely related to this doubt is the common allegation that Frege was unable to solve a persistent version of the Caesar problem for value-ranges. It is argued that, in Frege’s standards of reducing arithmetic to logic, his solution to the indeterminacy does not give rise to any sort of Caesar problem in the book.