Rudolf Lingens
fictional character created by the logician Gottlob Frege
Rudolph Lingens is a fictional character often used by contemporary analytic philosophers as a placeholder name in a hypothetical scenario which illustrates some feature of the indexicality of natural language. He was created by the logician Gottlob Frege in the course of one of the earliest systematic discussions of indexicals. A number of philosophers picking up on Frege's discussion of indexicals, notably John Perry, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker, have adopted Lingens to make their own points about indexicals.
De se attitudes
Lingens first appeared in Frege's influential essay 'Thought' ('Der Gedanke', published in Beiträge zur Philosophie des deutschen Idealismus I (1918–19), pp. 58–77). Mr. Lingens appears in the company of Leo Peter. Both are concerned with Dr. Gustav Lauben's having been wounded, and are later joined by Herbert Garner who is possessed of the knowledge that Gustav Lauben was born on 13 September 1875. Frege's discussion is concerned with how proper names and indexicals like 'I' function and how they are connected with the sense (or mode of presentation) that, on his account, each speaker who uses them associates with them.
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This entry incorporates text from “Rudolf Lingens” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.