The Structure of Frege's Thoughts

Fregean thoughts (i.e. the senses of assertoric sentences) are structured entities because they are composed of simpler senses that are somehow ordered and interconnected. The constituent senses form a unity because some of them are ‘saturated’ and some ‘unsaturated’. This paper shows that Frege's explanation of the structure of thoughts, which is based on the ‘saturated/unsaturated’ distinction, is by no means sufficient because it permits what I call ‘wild analyses’, which have certain unwelcome consequences. Wild analyses are made possible because any ‘unsaturated’ sense that is a mode of presentation of a concept together with any ‘saturated’ sense forms a thought. The reason is that any concept can be applied to any object (which is presented by a ‘saturated’ sense). This stems from the fact that Frege was willing to admit only total functions. It is also briefly suggested what should be done to block wild analyses.