Frege’s Conception of Truth as an Object and the Fregean Picture of Knowledge

Abstract

This paper aims to construct a picture of knowledge out of Frege’s comments on truth, judgment, assertion, and knowledge. Frege takes truth to be an object, and the act of judgment to be the act of non-judgmental identification of truth qua an object with the reference of a sentence. For him, the propositional knowledge that p is the non-propositional knowledge of the identity between truth and |p|. Propositional knowledge thusly understood is produced by our knowledge of truth qua an object, which is constituted by our abilities to identify truth as such. The Fregean picture of knowledge provides a tight connection between knowledge-how, objectual knowledge, and propositional knowledge.