Dummett on Frege: a modest proposal

I’ve been wanting to think a bit about Frege on assertion (and the assertion sign, content stroke, judgement stroke, etc.). So after revisiting Frege himself — not at his best, here — it was natural to turn to Dummett’s great book. Except that his chapter on Assertion is a mere 69 pages of continuous prose, without any sectioning, and without any guide posts. Which really isn’t forgivable. Paragraph by paragraph Dummett can be extremely clear: but it is only too easy to lose the overall thread.

What we need — a modest proposal —  is a third edition of Frege: Philosophy of Language where a sensitive and thoughtful editor divides the whole book into sections (and perhaps subsections too) on the model of Frege: Philosophy of Mathematics. After all, it isn’t that Dummett had a religious objection to chunking up his prose.  Even better, the editor could also provide a detailed old-style analytic table of contents. Then the reader could much more easily find their way through the book, and be greatly helped to see the structure of those long chapters as they unfold. (Here’s a rough-and-ready chunking of Ch. 2 which I did as a student hand-out, which gestures to what would be possible.)