Frege meets modern pragmatics

Gottlob Frege is often considered the founding father of modern semantics, but his work also contains numerous observations on pragmatic issues such as indexicals, (illocutionary) force, presupposition, and colouring.

It has often been assumed that Frege mentions these issues only to brush them aside and that his account of pragmatic phenomena therefore does not deserve much attention. More recently, however, scholars such as Laurence Horn (2007, 2013) and Lauri Karttunen (2016) have argued that Frege offers a “versatile and subtle toolkit” (Horn 2007) for analysing pragmatic factors.

The aim of the workshop is to take a fresh look at Frege’s toolkit and to evaluate the prospects for a “Fregean pragmatics”.

The workshop is part of the project “Zur Aktualität von Freges Pragmatik”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation).