Fregean Realism

Andrei Pop argues that Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, concept and object, and asserted and unasserted thought provides a superior account of the overlapping categories of fiction and art. This book also tackles case studies in Fregean art history and theory.

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Fregean Realism: Frodo Lives! and Other Fictions argues that literary fictions, pictures, and other artworks are modes of access to Gottlob Frege’s “third realm” of objective thoughts, about both what is in the real world and what is not, but might, or might not, be. Starting with a critique of fictionalism—the doctrine that art makes no ontological commitments because it depends on acts of pretending—Andrei Pop shifts focus to the shared meaning addressed by acts of pretending and other audience reactions to works of art. This book shows that a Fregean theory of sense, assertion, and concepts does justice to the context-specificity of artistic meaning while allowing for durable—indeed eternal—conceptual content. It explores implications for venerable problems such as the truth of art, the reality of aesthetic properties, beauty and ugliness, but also for specific genres or modes, like sculpture, allegory, the relation between image and caption, and the first-person picture.